


Only To Be With You

by SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John



Category: Black Mirror, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Episode: s03e04 San Junipero, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, Future Technology, M/M, Sherlock / Black Mirror Crossover, Sickness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-01-23 18:23:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 40,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12513512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John/pseuds/SinceWhenDoYouCallMe_John
Summary: I tell myself that next time I’ll come near this same place again. Wait around for the mysterious stranger in his coat to dash past me, hot on the heels of a new criminal in black.I think this all the way back to my Exit, planning where I’ll wait and what I’ll say when I see him. Scheming on how to get his name. It’s only once I reach the Exit Point door that I realize two hours and forty-five minutes have passed, and I realize that this won’t be the last time I Visit. It won’t be the last time at all.





	1. It Was One Empty Night

**Author's Note:**

> My heart broke in two pieces on the floor and then ascended up into the heavens watching the "San Junipero" episode of the show "Black Mirror" (Season 3, episode 4). 
> 
> I searched and searched for a Johnlock crossover and couldn't really find one (apologies if you wrote one and I just missed it!). So obviously, I had to go and write it. 
> 
> This fic is purely some self-indulgent fun for me! I'm following the major plot points of the episode pretty closely, but you'll see that this definitely has a lot of Sherlock thrown in too. Please forgive all British-related inaccuracies, especially with language, and please forgive me for my own twists and additions to the "San Junipero" universe. Like I said, I'm mainly writing this just so I can read it :) Enjoy!
> 
> The title is from the 1980's U2 classic "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."
> 
> SPOILERY CONTENT ADVISORY: For those of you who have not seen "San Junipero," or who don't know the plot, please be aware that this fic *does* contain major character death. It also contains brief references to the death of a child. However, I hope you can believe me when I say it also has an unambiguously happy ending. Seriously. I promise. If you're really worried, I suggest looking up the plot of "San Junipero" first, however be warned that you will have MAJOR SPOILERS. There's some major plot twists in here, y'all. Do what works best for you! Whether that's not reading, or reading some spoilers, or just diving right in.

_Day One_

The first sensation I feel upon opening my eyes is that I desperately need to sneeze. I stand there and try. Scrunch up my nose and hold my breath tight while the tickle deep in my throat flickers as if I’d swallowed a feather.

Turns out I can’t sneeze. I give up.

The air is filled with sweat and wet grime. It smells like a secret hidden away inside my bones for years – one I haven’t taken out to look at until this moment. It also smells ugly and foreign in the dark, hair raising on the back of my neck and lungs clenching to try and squeeze out the air. Get it away. 

I look down at my hands – hold them up close in the dim moonlight to try and see the fresh, young skin. Take two steps forward and marvel at the sturdy ground rising up level to meet my feet. 

No limp.

There’s music blaring out through the crack under the door next to where I stand all alone in the alley. Some eighties beat that hums deep in my veins, awakening a rhythm I thought had been lost forever just under the surface of my skin. I adjust the glasses sitting on the rim of my nose. Wonder why I even need eye glasses here – they told me I wouldn’t need them when I Visited. And anyway, isn’t that the whole point of coming here in the first place? 

But the thick brown frames feel comfortable on my face. I haven’t had to wear them in what feels like forever. Not since I went and had the surgery. They remind me more than anything that I truly am here. Make me feel like I’m back walking down the locker-lined hallways of high school with an armor of books against my chest and my glasses lenses to hold the world two steps back from me, armed and protecting myself.

I keep them on.

Part of me wants to find some quiet little nook to escape to in this sprawling, gnarled city. Hunker down in a soft, silent corner with a book I haven’t read in decades and let my mind just get used to it all. To this place. But I’m still standing frozen by the door to the club, and the music keeps blaring through the crack like thick wind blowing through a gap in splintered wood. It booms in the blood in my veins, choked and muffled through the door, and it makes me feel alone in a city I know is filled with people – filled to bursting with others like me. And so I take a deep breath and push open the metal door, flinching as a blast of sound and heat and sweat explodes against my face with a slap.

The inside smells like youth. Hot and fresh and alive. Stuffed down my raw throat like ripe, wet clothes. Stifling and greasy and sharp. I try to shrink and make myself invisible, crawling along the side of the wall with my sweaty palms pressed up against the peeling paint behind me. Bodies crush in on me from every side, writhing together dancing with sploshing drinks in their hands, wearing clothes I haven’t seen since God knows when, glittering and sparkling under the steaming, neon lights cutting sharply through the fog-like smoke.

The thick and humid air clouds up the lenses of my glasses. I take them off to wipe them on my shirt, shoving myself through the crowd, and then I walk hip-first straight into the bar. Walk into it like an idiot who can’t see. Except I can.

“You need a shot of something strong, you. Look like you just saw a ghost.”

The girl next to me leans on the bar with sequin covered shoulder pads, hair teased straight up towards the ceiling and smacking her bright pink gum. She’s smiling at me in a way I forgot people could.

I mutter a noise, flinging my glasses back on even though I can see clear as daylight without them. “Just new here, is all,” I say back. The smile feels odd on my face. 

She smirks at me and winks. I feel the wink sail right past my shoulder, missing my skin – its mark. “I remember my first Visit here,” she says. She leans forward onto the bar, and I know I’m supposed to take a look at her breasts. I do for a second, let my eyes flicker just over the curves of her nipples beneath her shimmering, tight silver shirt. But then I think how this stranger’s breasts are just slightly rounder than _her’s_ , and suddenly I don’t want to look anymore.

“Christ, I got so plastered,” she goes on. “Couldn’t remember what happened till I came back here the next week and everyone else told me I danced topless up on a table,” she laughs. 

I don’t know what the hell to say to that. Nobody’s talked like this to me in years. So carefree and open and fearless. So brash. It seems that they were right when they told me before I Visited– that you can be your old self in this place. Can be young.

I grin a bit, trying to play the game. “Yeah, I don’t blame you. It seems like a pretty wild place.”

“It seems like a pretty wild place,” she mimics, voice low. “Come on, man, loosen up a bit! This is the eighties! Not the Dark Ages in a church.”

I try to smile over my embarrassment, turning back gently towards the crowd, when she brushes up close against my arm, hot perfume drowning my nostrils. “I know a good way we could get those limbs nice and loose,” she whispers thickly. She trails a dainty hand slowly up my side until I nearly flinch, keeping her grip at my waist and tugging close. “Know a way to make you feel alive again.”

My gut churns. I’m torn between feeling ashamed that I want to go along with her and feeling ashamed that I don’t.

I push up my glasses, hating myself. “Nah, I’m . . I’m just getting my bearings,” I say. I step back from the reach of her hand. “But thank you.”

I curse under my breath and groan. _Thank you?_ Who the hell says “thank you” when they’re turning down an offer to go fuck? I wonder when I’ve even started thinking so brashly. I haven’t even thought the word “fuck” in years. It’s something about the air in this club, sweet and electric and hot. Buzzing.

The look on her face tells me she’s thinking the same – who the hell says “thank you” after looking at her breasts and saying, “actually I’d rather just stand here – no thanks!”? 

She shoots me a wilting look, sagging her mouth, and an odd, twisted part of me sees it and feels grateful. I’m familiar with that look – the way the eyebrows droop and the corners of the mouth wilt ever so slightly just so. That look doesn’t feel foreign and new. It isn’t thrumming or pulsing or strange. 

I’ve seen it before. It’s pity.

Then she turns from me and glides away into the crowd, hips swaying and hair sparkling in the thick neon lights. 

I watch her go and feel oddly alone. Look out at the sea of dancing bodies and can’t fully believe that I’m one of them – that my heart muscle beats and clenches exactly the same way. The air is too thick and sweet, clogging up my lungs. I start to edge once more around the crowd. Take a step and reach for my cane. 

It’s not there. 

Because of course it’s not there. They told me I wouldn’t need that here either. And wasn’t that the whole point of Visiting in the first place? But still I reach for it and I miss it and I trip forward hard, face first straight into a bloke who looks like he could beat the shit out of me, spilling half his beer over his hand. 

“Watch yourself, grandpa,” he sneers. The group all turns to look at me, caught like a deer in the headlights behind the glare off my glasses. I feel small. Old and small. I mumble out a “sorry” and trip over myself back into the smoke. Crawl and trudge and slink out of that club as fast as I can still half feeling like my leg’s going to give out from under me. Afraid it’s going to break clean in half.

It doesn’t. 

I escape out back into the alley and slam the door behind me against the roaring smoke and sound, shutting it off into a muffled thump and beat – slowly, slowly dying. I stumble out further into the alley on shaky legs and gulp down lungfuls of air, clearing out the sweat and grime and noise. Clearing out the floral perfume.

I stand in the moonlight and hang my head. A crinkled, black part of me wants to cry, fizzling down in my chest like a siren muffled by the weight of my lungs. The city continues to pulse and turn around me, daring and ignited and alive. Unaware that John Watson is standing in her belly like a tiny black spot of old death. A smudge in the center of an X-ray scan.

I walk back down the alley alone in the silence, moon and stars lighting the way I think is out.

I know in my bones I should never have come here. I’m already too dead for this place.

 

\--

 

_One Week Later_

I’m back in this place, and the city still sings, and this is the last time I’ll Visit.

I wipe my glasses off on the bottom of my plain button-down shirt, then wrap my cardigan tighter around myself. I wore dark colors this time – nothing special. Easier to fade back into the walls of the streets, pass the time by invisible until I can leave.

They said I need to come back and give it another try. Go somewhere calmer, somewhere quieter. Breathe in the city and try to make a friend and don’t feel bad if it’s all a bit overwhelming, Dr. Watson. It happens to everyone the first time they Visit. Nothing to feel ashamed about at all.

Except I don’t feel ashamed. I just feel dead. 

I think to myself that the girl I met last week at the bar hadn’t been dead or ashamed. Hadn’t worn dark colors or faded back into the walls. I hadn’t even met her. She had met _me_. And she hadn’t been overwhelmed at all. She’d been alive.

The familiar alley passes beneath my feet as I walk towards the club, the blaring music building then fading as my plain brown shoes carry me straight past the rattling metal door. I still reach out to grip for my cane, fingers numb and tingling when they realize it isn’t there to hold. My legs walk strong and steady, shooting warm strength up my spine.

It reminds me of why I chose this place to come to when I Visited. Why I chose this city. This Time.

Because this Time is before the War.

The winding, lamplit streets twist and churn out from the club at the city’s sprawling center. I try to pull up the map they’d shown me in my head, thinking of the best way to turn. I pass by other clubs and restaurants. Couples holding hands down the street in the moonlight, lone men smoking down fog-choked alleyways, young girls running down the sidewalks to catch taxis, holding their high heels in their hand while the stockings on their feet rip and tear.

I pass by a Cinema. Gape at the titles on the board. People are lined up on the chilly streets to see one – holding hands and laughing and dancing to the foggy music spilling out onto the pavement from a radio. I think about going in to see a film. Hiding in the dark just to tick away the minutes. Then I stop with my hand on the doorknob and leave. I already know the plot anyway, I tell myself. And why sit when I can finally walk without falling? When I can finally take a step without pain?

I pass by a diner, red vinyl booths filled. A record store and an arcade and a long street that leads straight down to what looks like a pier in the distance, rising like a castle from the foggy, black sea. 

The streets are thronging and humming with people who look just like me. Fresh, young skin and clean clothes and clear voices. Healthy, thick hair. No limps.

All of these people are alive.

I pass by it all, and I keep my eyes low, and nobody notices me. 

“Out of the way!”

I flinch and whip around as a body sprints right past me, shoving me aside before disappearing once more into the hazy black streets in the distance. Footsteps echoing. 

My lungs clench out of fear, body tense and waiting for the flashbacks I know will start running through my head any second now, choking me with thick, tense terror. I hold my breath and wait for the screams in my head – wait for my body to fall to the hard earth, limp and shaken and afraid.

“After him! He’s getting away!”

My eyes fly open. I haven’t fallen. Because this is before the War.

I suddenly realize that the second voice didn’t come from my head. I whip back around just in time to see another man sprinting towards me fast as hell, holding up a gloved hand towards the first man disappearing further into the fog. “He’s getting away!” he screams again.

I suck in a breath, and my body tenses up from head to toe.

I suck in a breath, and I run.

I sprint down the streets after the disappearing figure ahead of me, cold air crashing through my lungs, and the wind slapping against my face, and my feet kicking up clouds of dirt and gravel on the pavement. I feel a strange emotion on my face as the freezing air slaps against my teeth, numbing my tongue. I realize with a gasp that I’m smiling.

I’m just about to fly around a corner when the man behind me catches up, mile long legs eating up the pavement in giant, graceful gulps. “Go right,” he pants, and I do. Unthinking. I tear around the corner and zoom down another alleyway, thrilling as the suspect (when did I start thinking of him as a suspect?) dashes ahead of me, briefly illuminated by pale yellow lamplight spilling across the cold pavement.

We’ve got him cornered, I know. I can feel it deep down in my veins, zipping like fire. The suspect stops dead in his tracks, dirt cloud pluming around his heels. I see a flash of movement down at the farther end of the alley – the stranger, all in black, flying like a silent shadow creeping along in the dark. Crouching and ready to pounce.

We’ll both run towards him, I think to myself. We’ll corner him from either side and he’ll have no choice but to throw up his hands and surrender, straight out of a cheesy film they used to play on television at two a.m. One where the dirty cop calls the bad guy “kid.”

I flex my toes and burst down the alleyway, smile on my chapped lips, feeling like I could stretch out my arms and fly. The stranger does the same, a flash of black speeding down the alley like a silent shadow. The suspect turns towards him, legs tensed, ready to run. 

Everything stops, and they face off. I think the stranger’s going to say something menacing and growl. “Put ‘em up and surrender!” he’ll yell. “We’ve got you cornered, kid. The game’s up!”

Instead they stare at each other, not saying anything at all. Instead it’s silent like a whisper on the icy wet streets.

Instead the suspect twitches his fingers and pulls a gun.

A roar eats away inside me with a blinding snarl. I’m on top of him before I even know how I got there, tackling him to the ground in a crash. He grunts underneath me. Yells. I roll over on top of him and pin him to the ground, wrenching the gun from his grasp. My body moves on automatic pilot. Motions that I only ever do now in my dreams flow out of my legs and arms like smooth honey. No hesitation.

I flip on the gun’s safety and hurl it away across the pavement, ears tingling as the metal clacks and pings against the ground. I hold his face sideways into the ground with my palms, grinding his cheek into the asphalt. I open my dry mouth to say something, then realize I have absolutely no idea what to say at all. No idea why I’ve just tackled this man to the pavement. No clue in hell why I just chased him. My body tenses up and I freeze, guilt churning hot and frantic in my chest.

Tight fear.

“He committed an armed robbery, don’t worry.”

I jump at the voice. I’d forgotten that the stranger was even there. He emerges from the shadows, and I realize with a gasp that his skin is absolutely porcelain white, surrounded and swallowed up by a long, black coat – nothing like the eighties garb draped across the glittering swarms back in the clubs and the Cinema in the city. Nothing like my plain old shirt.

“Plus he did pull a gun on me,” the man finishes.

His voice is crisp like cubes of ice. He stands there pulling off his gloves with long, casual fingers, barely even breathing hard, no sheen of sweat on his skin.

“How do I know you’re not the robber?” I ask.

He chuckles and moves closer, and it’s only then I notice the rapid beating of the veins in his neck. The only indication of fear.

“He’d be an awfully inept cop if he ended up being chased by the suspect when he’s the one with a gun,” he says back.

I smile breathlessly, flowing through my lungs with a whoosh. I laugh once, big and hold. “You have a point.”

He silently hands me a pair of handcuffs and I work them around the wrists pinned underneath me. The suspect is silent, body slowly relaxing beneath me as he resigns himself to being caught. I finally get him secure, then sit up to wipe my dirty palms on my pants. My fresh, young hands are steady.

“Believe you dropped these.”

I turn startled and see an object held out close in front of my face. My eyes focus and I realize it’s my glasses, lenses pristine and un-cracked from the fall. Hot embarrassment creeps up my neck as I take them from his long, white fingers. I wipe the lenses off quickly on my shirt and place them back on my face, fingers slightly shaking as I push up the rims on my nose. I don’t say anything, but he hums, curious. 

“I didn’t think people needed those to Visit here,” he says.

I sit back on my heels and look down at the cuffed wrists in front of me. “I don’t need them,” I say to the ground. “I just . . . I wore ‘em when I was younger. Put them on without thinking when I got here.”

“You couldn’t imagine looking around in the eighties without glasses,” he says. Not a question.

I clear my throat. “Yeah, I guess so.”

He hums again, as if he just learned a new fact from an encyclopedia. Then he taps my shoulder and I quickly get to my feet, embarrassed that I stayed kneeling on the suspect for so long. The stranger grabs the suspect by the cuffed wrists and drags him to his feet, reeling him back around towards the entrance of the alleyway. Back towards the thrilling, buzzing light.

I feel small. “So you’re a police officer, then? I didn’t realize there was any crime here.”

He’s efficient. “No, and sort of.”

I take a step forward. “Well what do you mean by –"

“Your help was very much appreciated,” he cuts off, voice calm and crisp. “It would have been tedious in the extreme to disarm him myself. You really saved me a whole lot of time.” 

He takes a step forward, and he looks down at me, peering through the shadows and the fog. Moonlight pierces the clouds, illuminating the patch of wet asphalt where we stand, and suddenly we lock eyes, blinking through the dark. 

I nearly gasp. His eyes are opals, framed by long, black lashes and glittering in the creamy moonlight. His eyes widen briefly in something like surprise, and the air between us crackles, pulling out heat from my veins. I open my mouth to say more, to say something. My breath stutters. Caught. But before I can breathe he’s turning around and marching back down the alleyway, suspect in tow and black coat swirling out behind him like a cloud. Head held effortlessly high.

I stare at him frozen until he disappears from sight, turning the corner with one final dramatic swoop. The silence left in his wake is deafening, pressing down around me with a cold, led weight. I shiver in the thin air, heart still thrumming with leftover energy and confused legs rooted to the ground.

I’m alone.

The city feels achingly silent without him, stuck and frozen in time. My palms sting from where they hit the asphalt, and the blood still pumps hot in my legs, and I look down and see my plain dark pants are ripped just slightly over the knee. The only reminders that what just happened wasn’t all some sick War dream plastered against a landscape where I’m twenty-four and still wear glasses and haven’t yet been handed a notice from the Draft.

I shove my hands in my pockets and force myself to walk down the streets, a half-hearted “guess that’s it, then,” echoing in my chest. The sky feels dark and airless above me, hovering there with no real promise of wind. I look down at my watch and groan. It’s only been fifteen minutes since I got here. I still have two hours and forty-five minutes left. Enough time to chase down eleven more suspects. But I can’t chase down suspects in my head, by myself.

It hurts, I realize. To be alive for five fierce minutes and then dropped back into the cold. Into nothing. My body wants to leap and run and fight. To yell.

Instead I walk slowly with my hands in my pockets, one foot in front of the other towards the alley where I know that the door to my Exit Point will be. Maybe if I walk slowly enough it will take me two hours and forty-five minutes to get there. Maybe then I won’t have to sit in a chair and wait in the dark until I can leave. Just like I did last week.

I tell myself that next time I’ll come near this same place again. Wait around for the mysterious stranger in his coat to dash past me, hot on the heels of a new criminal in black.

I think this all the way back to my Exit, planning where I’ll wait and what I’ll say when I see him. Scheming on how to get his name. It’s only once I reach the Exit Point door that I realize two hours and forty-five minutes have passed, and I realize that this won’t be the last time I Visit. It won’t be the last time at all.

 

\--

 

_One week later_

I wait. 

I’m wearing my favorite blue button-up shirt – one I thought would never fit me again. I’d grown too thin.

Now it fits over my young body clean and snug, hugging the unfamiliar muscles on my chest and sitting just right across my sides. It’s perfect in a way that nothing has been perfect for a very, very long time.

I stand in a lamplit square near the alleyway where it all began – where for five glorious minutes last week I remembered that I was alive. A part of me feels hot embarrassment for hanging around, hoping for a glimpse of shadow moving through the golden, buzzing fog. He would probably pity me – the stranger in black. If we even got the chance to say more words than “after him!” and “don’t worry, he’s a criminal,” and “here, I believe you dropped these,” and “goodbye.”

But the other part of me, the part of me buried small and withering in the very deepest pit of my soul - God how it wants to take off down a wet alleyway and feel the thrilling slap of freezing air blast against my face, winding its way through my teeth. Wants it badly enough to have sat through the surprised stares when I told them all that I wanted to come back again this week, even though last week I said I was only giving it another go to humor them. So they could mark it off on their checklist: _John Watson went twice and declined further Visits. Presumed reason: failure to adjust._

I breathe in the scent-less streets as I walk, feeling present when I know that instead I should feel alone. This part of the city feels timeless in a way that hovers comfortingly over my skin, letting me just be me. There’s no music blaring from underneath cracked doors to remind me of the Time, no sequined clubbing shoulder pads and hair teased up to the heavens, no movie posters or diner menus or cherry red Pontiac’s lined up down the glittering, steaming streets.

Where I stand it’s just grey and quiet and soft, the bones of the eternal city exposed beneath the layers of makeup painted across her face for each Time. In a way it feels like the twin of myself – exposed in a bright blue shirt in the moonlight, stripped bare for the very first time in decades from the layers of War and Catherine and _her_.

I shove my hands in my pockets, and don’t let myself fade back into the shadows, and I scrunch up my nose underneath the rim of my glasses and wait. Feeling like a starving man waiting with a dry mouth for a gleaming slice of frosting-topped cake, not sure if the cake will ever come. But hoping. God, hoping.

A footstep behind me, wet and slapping on the street. “Oh good, you’re here. Come on or we’ll be late.”

The familiar voice curls up my spine and tugs. I whip around to face him but he’s already leaving, long legs eating up the pavement down the street. I suck in a breath and jog to catch up. My hand doesn’t reach for my cane.

We walk side by side in silence, following the liquid, twisting curves of the city, guided by the stars and the moonlight, far away from the thronging groups of people back at the center. His coat brushes against my ankles as we walk, and the fogs of our breaths mix in the thick, syrupy air. I want to look at him, but I don’t. I realize with a rush of shame and excitement that I don’t give a shit where we’re going. Who he is or how he knew I would be there or whatever in hell we’re about to go do.

I’m alive, walking next to him down an empty silent street, and I set my chin and refuse to stop to think about why.

He breaks the silence, voice booming straight through my skin. “What should I call you in case we get separated?”

I hesitate. I hadn’t ever thought of a Time Name to use here. Hadn’t ever expected to need to give one. I lick my lips and try to keep stride. “John,” I finally say.

He huffs. “You couldn’t think of something any more inventive in the three whole seconds you took to make that up?”

I look straight ahead. “It’s my name,” I say.

I catch his eyes flicker sideways to look at me, eyebrows up in surprise. Then it’s gone in a flash. He hums. “It’ll have to do, then,” he says, resigned.

I clear my throat, feeling like a little kid speaking up in class just after the teacher demanded silence. “And you? What should I call –”

“You won’t need to,” he cuts me off. Then, softly, “We’re here.”

He stops dead in his tracks and I scramble to stop in time, feeling like if I take one step past his feet he’ll disappear behind me, faded back into the fog forever. I hold my breath. The building in front of us is old and sagging, peeling paint and rusted pipes and bricks that look like they’re made of barely held together dust, threatening to crumble into the icy, thin air. It looks nothing like the previews they’d shown me of this city. Nothing like the pamphlets and testimonies and brilliant, glossy photographs I’d held in my wrinkled hands under white fluorescent lights. It looks nothing like the promise of Time.

I whisper, afraid my voice will shatter the ancient walls. “I didn’t know places like this existed here.”

I expect a scolding, but the stranger just hums beside me, considering. “They definitely don’t include this in the brochures,” he agrees. “But there’s more here than just a never-ending night out.”

I feel bold. The city sleeps around us, waiting to be awoken by my feet dashing unhindered through her streets – smile on my face. I keep my eyes fixed on the outline of the building, towering up towards the sky and blocking out the light from the stars. “So what are you here to do?” I ask.

He breathes in deeply, and I feel myself mimicking him, pathetically eager like a child waiting to be taken on a promised ice cream trip to town. 

“There’s a man that’s been using this place as his hideout since he first Visited,” he says low. “Murdered his wife back in ’67 in the World. Now he runs this place here.” He gestures towards the crumbling façade. “Created his own drug den. Supplies half the clubs. He’s been building it up since he first came to Stay six months ago.”

My brain scrambles, trying to catch up. “I thought convicted criminals weren’t allowed to Stay? Or even Visit?”

He chuckles once, harsh under his breath. “Exactly. But innocent people are convicted, and guilty people aren’t caught.”

I nearly gasp. The stranger’s existence suddenly expands before me in a blaze, filling the dark horizon. “So that’s what you do here?” I say. “You track down criminals who were never caught in the World? Who shouldn’t be here?”

He hums distracted, pale eyes roving over the building in front of us, looking like he’s building up a plan. “Something like that,” he says. His voice is guarded. A locked gate.

My toes tingle, and warmth burns fresh in my chest. I speak my thoughts out loud before I mean to, voice pathetic and breathless. “That’s amazing,” I say.

The air changes. He glances towards me with parted lips, breath fogging in the moonlight. I look back at him and feel electricity shoot down my legs. Makes me want to leap up into the air and kick and yell something stupid like “Yes! I’m alive! So are you!”

He scrunches his eyes, and suddenly I feel embarrassed. “Sorry,” I mutter to his feet.

He looks back at the building, jaw tight. “No it’s . . . it’s alright.” 

His voice is different, soft and trembling. Uncertain when I’ve only ever heard him speak commands. He clears his throat and goes on, and the redness on my neck evaporates as his words cut through the air like the neon lights back at the club, tingling and sharp.

“We’ll take him by surprise,” he says. My heart beats double time at the _we_. “Three of his inner circle are out tonight, trying to pick up new clients. Only one is in there with him now. He’s dangerous. Ex-military.” He looks towards me suddenly, and my throat freezes. “He shouldn’t be a problem for you, though,” he says slowly.

I want to vomit. Somehow he knows.

I swallow hard and look down at my feet. Wonder how I can make my excuses and leave before he tells me that I shouldn’t be allowed to Visit, just like the criminal he’s about to take down. I want to run like lightning back to my Exit Point and wait it out in the dark until it’s time to go. Until the scarring on my chest and stomach stops searing with heat. 

It’s the only part of me that carried over physically from the World. The only part of my fresh, young skin that isn’t from before the War. I guess they haven’t figured out how to delete a wound that deep when you visit Time. Not as simple as something like no longer needing glasses. Not as simple as curing a limp.

His voice startles me. “Oh please, I don’t give a shit about the Protest,” he says quickly. “I just care that you can take this guy out while I go after Van Cleave.”

I force myself to meet his gaze, and almost gasp when I realize he isn’t joking. His eyes are calm and steady. Earnest. “His men will be back soon,” he says. “It’s now or never.”

I swallow down my fear, blood pulsing thickly in my veins, and somehow force myself to nod. “Ok.”

Something flashes across his face, something that looks like relief, then he’s walking straight and tall towards the building, gloved hand reaching into his pocket to whip out a set of lock picks. He drops to his knees swiftly on the wet streets. Goes to work on the rusty old lock as the wind weeps and moans around us in the empty square. 

He speaks from the ground, whispering. “Turn right when we enter. There’s a set of stairs. Hintley, that’s your man, will be waiting at the top once they hear this door creak open. Keep him occupied while I head to the back up the hidden stairs in the kitchen so I can get to Van Cleave. If you hear me whistle twice, leave immediately and meet me in the square. I’ve a Yamaha parked nearby in case we need to run, or in case we need to chase. Keys are under the seat. If anything happens. . .” he trails off, rising swiftly to his feet and fixing me with a gaze I feel deep in my gut like a fist. “Take it and get back to your Exit Point.”

“What – and leave you?”

He nods.

I frown, voice desperate. “What do you mean if anything happens? I thought you couldn’t actually get hurt here?”

He swallows hard, and an odd look passes over his face. “That’s only if your pain monitor is turned up all the way. They do it for you automatically when you Visit. You should be fine.”

I feel frantic. “But yours isn’t?”

He hesitates, hand on the doorknob. Then he starts to twist it, door creaking loudly open and echoing through the silence like a blast. He doesn’t look at me. He speaks into the darkness of the room. “I don’t have one,” he quickly murmurs. He takes a step inside and places a hand on my chest to stop my response. It’s the first time he’s ever touched me, and I feel it reverberate throughout my body. Echoing against bones. 

“Remember the plan,” he breathes. Then he’s gone, slinking away into the shadows like a vapor, disappearing in seconds into the thick blackness of the house.

I want to reach out and grab him and pull him back to me. A million questions vibrate in my mind, spilling out in shaking breaths.

“ _John_ ,” he hisses like a ghost from the shadows.

I shake my head and spring into action. Flex my hands as I creep silently up the sagging wood staircase, dodging spiderwebs hanging from the ceiling in the moonlight and pressing my body back against the peeling, moldy wall. For the first time all night I wish I was wearing dark colors again. Easier to fade away and sneak up on this Hintley so that the stranger can somehow capture a murderer who got away with it in the World.

I want to laugh to myself as I crawl up step by step, thrilling each time my leg doesn’t give out under the careful weight of my body. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I’ve never done anything like this in my life. Definitely not since the War.

A stair creaks from the top of the second flight, deafening in the stillness. 

It’s Hintley – I know it. 

I hear him breathing, harsh and uneven. He can’t see me creeping slowly towards the landing from the first flight of crumbling stairs. Not yet. Desperately I look down and see an old carpet weight shoved into the corner of the step two above me. I crouch down on steady legs, holding my breath, and pick up its hefty weight in my hand. Fingertips crushing against dust. 

He’s creeping down towards me, one stair at a time. The air in the darkness between us is electric. We both make our way towards the landing as the house holds its breath, waiting to see who will win. My heart beats wildly in my chest, and adrenaline fires through my veins. I can see his outline in the moonlight from the cracks in the ceiling up above, shooting down swirling beams through the thick, dusty air. 

He can’t see me yet. I’m a ghost.

I’m three steps away from the landing where we’ll meet when suddenly a crash explodes through the house from the upstairs. A voice screams out, and it isn’t the stranger. Hintley sucks in a breath and whips around like lightning, and that’s when I grit my teeth and strike. I leap onto him from behind, arm around his neck and face plastered into his greasy hair. He grunts and reaches back and throws me around to the stairs. Flat on my back.

I whimper. I’m shit out of practice. He leans back to punch and I whack the carpet weight across his arm, hurling it into the void of the room below after impact. He screams. We wrestle with each other on the stairs, muscles straining and hands gripping at skin and hair and clothes like iron fists, tearing at bodies like one of us will simply disappear under a strong enough punch.

The pain when he hits and scratches me feels muffled – like it’s happening through the cover of a blanket on my skin. More crashes and yells continue from above – then sprinting footsteps and the slam of a door. Sweat pours down my forehead. My breath like a saw. Fingers tensed and numb. 

In the back of my mind I realize with a smirk that my glasses are still on my face. Lenses clean.

Suddenly I hear it – two fierce whistles screaming through the house, cutting through the fog as if the whole structure erupted into sunlight. My body feels lighter than air, burning with the power of the absent sun. A power overtakes me, electrifying my arms, and I grunt as I grip Hintley’s muscled shoulders, knee him in the groin, and with a terrifying burst of strength heave him clear over the sagging stair railing, sending him tumbling to the ground with a thud. I leap to my feet and dash down the stairs three at a time. Grab the carpet weight from where it rolled on the floor and reach him just in time to smash him across the face, knocking him out cold on the rotting, old wood.

I can’t hear any more yelling or movement up above – no footsteps running frantic across the creaking beams of the ceiling. Lungs in my throat I rush out into the empty square. Nearly moan with relief when I see the stranger sprinting out from the alley behind the house, frantically peering through the darkness. He doesn’t see me.

He calls out into the silence, voice strangled. “John!”

I run towards him. Flying. “I’m here.”

His eyes are blazing in the moonlight. He takes one look at me running towards him and a funny tension in his shoulders escapes, sagging and relaxed. He motions for me to follow and we sprint towards a Yamaha parked in the safety of the dark. He leaps on in one movement and starts the engine with a roar. I climb on behind without hesitation. Without needing to ask.

We tear off and soar down the street, tires screeching like screams into the starlight and headlight cutting through the fog like splintered glass. I hold on tight to his hips, fingers numb from the cold. His body is warm and solid in front of me, sizzling under my palms with living heat. Long black curls fly into my face, dance against my cheek. I breathe in the icy air slapping against my face and want to turn my head up towards the stars and whoop for joy, laughter bubbling fiercely in my chest.

I feel him shaking against me. Lean forward and turn my head and see that he’s smiling. Laughing. Wide grin illuminated by the moonlight as we speed through the wet streets closer and closer to the vibrant city center, each block becoming more alive as we pass. 

I yell over the roar of the engine. “So you got Van Cleave?”

The wind feels like a kiss weaving through my thick hair. Sharp and thrilling against my scalp. The stranger nods. “I did.”

I blink hard, mind racing trying to fit the pieces together like a puzzle, only the pieces are flying past me as we zoom along the streets on the motorbike, soaring past my face at the glittering speed of light. “What did you do with him?”

The stranger turns his face sideways for a brief second, letting me see his profile etched like porcelain against the smoky, black backdrop of the city. “I took care of it. That’s all you need to –”

A bullet whizzes past his face with a sharp crack, splintering through the rushing air. The stranger curses. “Shit!” I look back, blood boiling, and see Hintley speeding after us on his own glistening motorbike, one arm raised towards us holding a smoldering, silver gun. 

Hot shame explodes across my face. I hadn’t hit him hard enough. Hadn’t done my job at all. I grip the stranger’s hips harder with my hands, eyes clouding up with sharp water from the force of the blinding wind, even behind the shield of my glasses. 

I force out choked words. “I’m sorry, I thought I –”

“Shut up, I need to think.”

My mouth flings shut, tongue heavy and dry. Two more bullets zing past our heads as the stranger weaves in and out of sparse traffic, winding across pavement and asphalt alike and speeding through a zigzag of mailboxes, streetlamps, and fire hydrants. The motorbike’s tires scream on the wet streets, flinging up water and dust in their wake as we fly.

I can hear Hintley gaining on us. Hear the roar of his engine slowly overtaking ours. Feel one more bullet whiz dangerously close to my head, singing the tips of the hairs on my left side. 

They told me you couldn’t get hurt when you Visit, but they never really said if you could die.

I lean in close against the stranger as the motorbike leans dangerously close to the ground with his turns. Try to keep my toes from grinding against the ground as we weave. Suddenly he grips the handlebars and jerks us right so hard I nearly fly off the bike.

“Hold on,” he says belatedly. 

Before I can scream we’re soaring down an outdoor flight of stairs, floating across the tops of the steps and barreling towards the ground at the bottom. Another bullet flies past, this one widely missing it’s mark, and for the first time I notice the stranger counting under his breath, keeping track of how many bullets Hintley’s used. “Four. . .”

Each crack of the gun firing flashes the smoking battlefield into my mind. Bubbling and hot and steaming with blood. Smoldering into the bleeding cracks of the earth, dragging me down deeper towards the screaming, towards the horror . . .

“We’ll lure him down the dead end at the pier, and then I’ll Dispatch him,” the stranger calls back over the wind.

Suddenly the battlefield is gone, replaced with the neon bright city zooming past my eyes, shocked people running for safety to the pavements, blending into a sea of colors and glitter and hair.

I have no idea what the stranger even means, but I nod into his neck, eyes squeezed shut but hands still steady on his waist. I open my eyes three minutes later, just after bullet number five soars past, and get a sudden lungful of salt. The ocean.

It churns in the moonlight beside us as we zoom down the seaside road, speeding towards the illuminated stretch of pier that I can just make out at the edges of the sand. Hintley still revs his engine behind us, gaining ground. 

An exploding crack pierces the air, echoing across the sea. “Six . . .”

The motorbike’s tires screech against the wooden planks as we rush onto the pier. It rumbles in a rhythm beneath us as we fly down over the water, zooming straight and narrow towards the end.

We won’t be able to stop in time. I know it. I close my eyes shut and gulp down a breath. Am shocked and warmed from deep in my chest when that breath contains the smell of the stranger’s skin – sweat and soap and musk. Soft warmth.

Hintley’s tires rumble across the wooden planks behind us, shaking the foundations of the dark and empty pier. With a grunt the stranger suddenly whips the handlebars hard to the left and screeches us to a stop with a smoking scream from the tires, nearly hurling me from the backseat as I clutch fully around his waist, face buried deep in his hair. Without stopping to breathe he leaps from the motorbike, drawing something small from his pocket. 

Another bullet flies. He ducks. 

I climb from the bike on liquid legs and stay just behind him to his side, palms flexing. I stare down Hintley barreling towards us, wondering if he’ll just run me straight over instead of trying to aim again to shoot.

He shoots. 

“Eight,” the stranger whispers. “Perfect.”

Suddenly I realize, dawning on me like the sun. Hintley’s out. And from the looks of it, Hintley doesn’t realize it yet. He slams on his own brakes and stops in a cloud of smoke, holding his gun steady towards the stranger as he creeps towards him on the pier.

The stranger stalks towards him calmly. Chin high. “No doubt you’ve noticed that Van Cleave has been Dispatched,” he says.

I stand there like I know what he means. Like I know what the fuck’s going on. My toes are thrumming.

Hintley grunts. “Yes. Probably while this weasel here was trying to claw at me on the stairs like a pathetic four-eyed cat.”

His eyes pierce through me. I want to drop to my knees, throw up my hands, and say sorry. Want to hurl my glasses down into the sea.

I don’t.

The stranger laughs once, harsh. “Funny,” he says, holding up the object in his hand towards Hintley. “Because that weasel over there was at least two ranks below you in the military, and yet he managed to immobilize you just long enough for me to walk right up to Van Cleave. Your only job.”

Hintley snarls at me, and suddenly I realize what the stranger is trying to do. Draw Hintley towards me so he can sneak around behind him and do whatever the hell he means to do with the gleaming black stick in his hands.

I swallow hard and pray to god we haven’t miscounted the bullets. I puff up my chest.

Hintley creeps towards me, teeth barred. “There’s no way in hell this weasel was in the military. Beady little eyes behind his glasses like a school boy. Probably doesn’t even know how to shoot a gun proper.”

In a flash the gun is raised and pointed straight at my chest. Hintley sneers one last time and dramatically pulls the trigger. My heart stops.

Silence.

Hintley starts to snarl and look down at the useless gun in his hands when the stranger leaps from behind him and tackles him to the ground with a grunt, long, slender limbs flying through the air, clothed in gleaming black. He whips around the object in his hand and presses it to the side of Hintley’s forehead. 

“It’s bad form to insult a fellow soldier,” he spits in Hintley’s face. Then he presses a button, and the stick glows blinding white, and with a startled gasp Hintley evaporates into thin air, leaving not even a shadow behind.

I stare. “Where did he –”

“I Dispatched him,” the stranger says, getting calmly to his feet. He brushes off the dust from his pristine black trousers. “He’ll awaken in the World with an alarm on his Device. Whatever nurse is looking after him will know how to take it from there. He won’t be allowed back to Visit. Or Stay.”

My mind reels, heart beating fast and solid in my chest. A block of ice. “But Van Cleave . . . He wasn’t just a Visitor –”

“Same general concept. The alarm on his permanent Device will let Central Control he wasn’t supposed to be in Time in the first place. He’ll be Shut Off.”

“Without any evidence?”

The stranger frowns at me harshly. “I’m never wrong.”

We stare at each other in the moonlit dark, and suddenly the air starts to crackle again, sighing and heaving against my skin like hundreds of fingertips. Making me want to step towards him.

I do.

The stranger blinks hard and sucks in a breath. The frown disappears. “You’re hurt,” he cries. He rushes towards me, eyes blown wide. I lift up a finger to my forehead and pull it away to see a smear of hot blood.

“The bullet must have grazed me,” I say. “I didn’t even feel it.”

“Well, that is the whole point,” the stranger huffs. But it doesn’t quite work. His voice is shaken. He whips a handkerchief from his pocket, black silk like the rest of his clothes, and wipes it quickly across my forehead before I can protest. “You’ll feel an ache there when you’re back in the World,” he says low. His mouth is turned down at the corner. 

“It wasn’t your fault,” I say quickly. Because how can I explain to him? That for the first time in decades I just felt alive? Truly _here_?

He tucks away the handkerchief in his pocket and puts his hand back on my forehead. Then slowly, slowly, it travels down to rest on the side of my face. His palm is warm in the freezing air. Calloused but soft on my cheek.

He licks his full lips, and I can’t tear my eyes from his face. “What you did,” he says low. “Last week, what you did in the alley . . .”

I know what he means. I swallow hard, pulse racing. “You’re welcome,” I say.

His eyes are two glittering stars, fixed and burning into my own. Fixed and burning straight through to my mind. He leans closer, and suddenly I flinch.

“You really don’t mind,” I say. “About . . . that I was in the War? That I shouldn’t be here?”

He huffs out a breath, fogging in the air. The breeze blows a curl across his forehead. “Why the hell would I mind?” he asks.

I almost laugh. _Everyone_ minds. I can feel his hot breath dance across my cold lips. Feel his words bounce off the tip of my tongue waiting just inside my mouth. 

_She_ had minded. Catherine had minded. The Protestors filling the streets had sure as hell minded. But I look and I see nothing but truth in his eyes. Nothing but clear open wonder. It makes my eyes sting, and I blink.

He’s closer. “How could I mind?” he breathes. It’s barely a whisper. Awestruck and quivering straight up into the clouds. 

I feel bold. I’ve felt nothing but bold in his presence. I lift my steady hand to his own face. Feel the smooth skin under my palm. No imperfect roughness. No stubble.

“Sherlock Holmes,” he whispers against my lips.

I don’t need to clarify. “Sherlock Holmes,” I echo back. And I pull his face closer to mine, heart thrilling. I don’t think of Time or _her_ or the bullets. I don’t think of my cane. The scarring. The pity.

I think of his full warm lips descending towards mine. Of the way his breathe trembles against my own in the air, hopeful and warm.

God, how I’ve wanted this. How I’ve _wanted_ and never known.

His lips are almost on mine. Almost touching me now. . .

The alarm on my wrist blares into the air, shattering the silence. I flinch in his arms and pull back. The alarm counts down. _Five_ , then _four_ , then _three_. . .

His eyes widen in shock, and his palm on my face is fierce. 

_Two_ . . .

“John,” he whispers.

Then I’m gone.

-

I wake up gasping in my chair. The walls are white. 

“No,” I moan. “No, no, no.”

I look around me desperately, spotting the nearest nurse bent over the woman beside me, gently adjusting the Device on the side of her forehead. My voice sounds warbled and thick. Rusty like it’s been under water.

“I need to go back,” I cry out to her. “Please, I need to go back.”

She looks up and gives me a look that slices my heart in two, leaving it heaving and bleeding on the floor. 

Pity.

She walks forward and takes my hand in hers. I can’t look down at it. Can’t see the contrast of my wrinkled, frail skin up against the fresh, young skin of her fingers.

“It’s alright, Dr. Watson,” she says slowly. “You have your appointment for next week in the calendar to look forward to. Only one short week until your next Visit,” she smiles.

She leans forward and gently removes the Device from my forehead, placing it reverently in a gleaming white dish. I grasp her hand tighter, hating how my grip is weak and slow. Hating how my fingers shake and tremble against hers. I reach up with the other hand to adjust my glasses, grasping at air when I realize they’re not there. 

I’m in a fog. “But I need to go back,” I say again, desperate. “I need to tell him . . .”

“Oh you met a friend, then?” Her eyes are sparkling and clear, looking at me like I just hung the moon. Like a child who finally moved from a sippy cup to a straw.

Suddenly I realize it’s worthless. I lessen my weak grip on her hand, fingers shaking, and settle myself back in my chair with a groan I try to hide. I force a smile. “I guess so,” I say. 

I need to get out, to get air. I motion limply for my cane by the wall and she moves quickly to retrieve it – light on her feet like a cloud. “It’s always a good idea to get some fresh air after Visiting,” she says, as if I just came up with the idea for electricity.

Her brown eyes sparkle as I grip the cane, and I nod at her that she can move away before I try to stand. I don’t need her staring at me struggle. Not now. Not with the dull ache of a bullet graze panging hot on my forehead. Not with the warm ghost of his lips against my own. Almost touching. Almost.

I grip my cane with shaking fingers and heave myself to standing, groaning at the hot pain screaming in my leg and the creaking ache in my back. I pant when I’m upright, trying to catch my breath. I force myself forward on small, shaking steps, wincing as fresh heat burns in my thigh and hip. I’ll need a higher dosage of medication soon – I know it. One step closer to the grave.

I make my way slowly towards the balcony of the Home, passing by others like me lying frail and trembling in their beds. I’m nearly moaning when I finally make it outside. My body feels like a metal statue being forced to walk, heavy and tense and painful at the joints. The scarring on my chest feels like tar. My hand grips desperately at the balcony railing and I sag against it, gasping for breath and lightheaded at the effort. 

Finally I open my eyes and look out at the moon, hanging bright and full over rolling hills down to the churning sea far below. A puff of salty air blows its way up towards my face, caressing my neck and cheeks in the dark. At least, I imagine it does.

Hot water stings at the backs of my eyes, and I blink hard and look up towards the boundless sky, hand gripping tightly at my cane.

I gasp. The stars are the exact same color of his eyes. The eyes of Sherlock Holmes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise that more answers are coming! And more action, romance, smut, angst, love, etc.
> 
> I'd expect Chapter 2 to be up within the next two weeks. 
> 
> Any feedback is greatly appreciated! :) Thank you so much for reading. It really means a lot.  
> (And I promise that I'm still responding to comments on 'Gimme Shelter'! Slowly but surely.)
> 
> Until then you can find me on:  
> [Tumblr](http://sincewhendoyoucallme-john.tumblr.com//) and [Twitter](http://twitter.com/sincewhen_john/)


	2. Run Through the Fields

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I won’t look for the stranger tonight, I think. I’ll run and be free and eat ice cream and be alive. I’ll run through the city until the sun starts to rise and the air feels fresh in my lungs. Run through the thronging streets and across dance floors and under the streetlights and stars just to prove to myself that I can.
> 
> Next thing I know I look up at where I’ve run to, and the elation dies thickly in my chest.
> 
> I’m by the pier.

_One week later_

“The usual Time, then, Dr. Watson?”

The nurse looks at me calmly like she never expects in a million years for me to say anything but simply, “yes.”

I say, “Yes.” Then add, “Please.”

She smiles down at me softly, eyes glittering in the fluorescent white lights of the nursing Home. She picks up the Device gently in her smooth thin fingers, bringing the tiny blue disk to the side of my forehead where I know the light will start to blink and pulse, aligned to the beat of my veins. 

Her fingers gently rest on the side of my face, as if I need help to keep my head turned her way. “Now, your Exit Point will take you to your usual place, near the city center,” she says like she’s said three times before. “Unless there’s anywhere else . . .?”

My mouth responds before my brain can decide what to say. My voice is rushed and urgent. “The pier.”

She frowns, licking her lips. “The pier will be too cold this time of year at night, I think,” she says. “But maybe there’s a café near the sea where you could go. One that’s open late –”

“The pier will be fine,” I interrupt. I wince at myself. I don’t know who this person is – whose heart races at the thought of a Visit and who interrupts kind nurses and resents them for their smooth, thin hands. I swallow hard and force myself to breathe. Slow and calm. The same way my tired body moves through the World.

“Sorry, I just–” I stop. I think maybe I can cover up the illogic of it with something nostalgic. Something she couldn’t argue with – the sea reminding me of _her_ perhaps. Or some bullshit about it giving me peace from the haunting memories of the War. Then my eyes catch sight of the tiny pin at the top of her pristine white collar. The white peace sign over the field of red – the symbol of the Protest.

I realize suddenly that she must not know that I was once a soldier. That she must think the scarring from my shoulder to my hip really was from a housefire – just like I always told _her_ before she found out. Surely this nurse is too kind to wear that in front of me if she knew. We were run down on the streets and spit on by people wearing that symbol on their collars. Our names were turned in to the police by friends and family.

Our names are on a list to never get to visit Time. Same as the murderers and thieves. 

It thrills me inwardly that I’ve hid myself so well. That I’ve been so good in the World that the black and bleeding line in my personal file that says “Fought” is too drowned out by the smiling family and good deeds and medical awards to be found. And look at me now, old and crumpled in my chair. Dr. Watson doesn’t look like a killer with a gun, does he? Dr. Watson doesn’t look like a man whose name should be blacklisted from Time, surely? We don’t really need to check his file and make sure he’s allowed to Visit – what red flag could we possibly find?

I realize she’s waiting for what I’m about to say. I lie, now that I know I’m quite good at it.

“I won’t stay there,” I say, voice light and thin. “I’m just being picked up there. My friend.”

She looks at me like I just won some National Award. “ _Dr. Watson: Friendliest Old Person - Least likely man with cancer to die alone_.”

Only it’s ridiculous. Because she knows that I’m the only person in this goddamn Home who’s never even once had a visitor. Who never would have had the slightest _chance_ of a visitor. Not since my precious little Catherine closed her eyes and died. And not since _she_ followed her quickly to the grave. No, I am alone. 

She’s looking at me with sad eyes, and I realize she’s thinking the same exact thing. She really is a good nurse, this little pale slip of a woman, floating on her feet like tiny clouds. Even with the pin on her collar. 

She pats my bad knee and rises to her feet, leaning over to adjust the wall of pillows behind my back. “Just make sure you wear something warm,” she says – something she would never think to say to the twenty-five-year-old me I’m about to become in Time. Something she thinks she needs to say to the eighty-five-year-old me now.

I give her one last smile and lean back and close my eyes. I feel a warm pressure on the side of my head, then the soothing beep of the countdown on the watch on my wrist. _Five_ , then _four_ , then _three_ , then _two_.

Then I’m gone.

-

I’m at the Exit Point. My old bedroom – the one I rented just before the War. Clothes are strewn over the creaking wood floor, across my old bed with my red flannel duvet. The walls are made of smoke, and my feet float ghost-like clear above the ground. In limbo.

I pick up the glasses from the top of my dresser and put them on like sheathing a sword. Rifle through the closet until I find an old dark grey jumper I was always fond of and my favorite pair of dark blue jeans. I grab my coat at the last minute. The nurse was right – I don’t want to freeze. It took almost three days to get the numb chill out of my bones after the last Visit. It had been icy cold on the pier.

I still feel the ghost of his breath on my lips. Warm and soft. Fire.

I turn to look in the mirror then remember there isn’t one. Not until after your fifth Visit, they said. Don’t want you getting too attached to your Time Form. Don’t want you to hate having to come back to the World.

Too late. I’m already pretty fucking attached. Attached to being alive.

Hand on the doorknob, I take a deep breath and steel myself to open it. The wall of thick smoke smothers around my body, and I close my eyes tightly against the swirling black, and I fall.

-

The pier is deathly cold. Icy wind whipping across my face from the roaring waves, sinking straight through my skin to my bones. I curse under my breath and shiver, pulling my coat tighter around my strong frame. I marvel at the way my skin fits my body tight and smooth. Marvel once more at the way the ground stays steady underneath my feet.

No limp.

My eyes adjust to the darkness. Look around frantically for a swirl of black coat, a hint of curls blowing harshly in the moonlight. A sliver of pale, glowing skin.

I see nothing. The pier stretches before me barren and void, moaning in the empty wind and stranding me away from the shore. Separated. 

I call out over the sound of the rushing waves, feeling tiny and soundless. “Sherlock?” 

Freeze in my tracks to listen. Nothing moves, and nobody answers. I feel like an absolute fool. Who said he would magically still be here a week later? Who said he needed my useless help again? 

Who said he wanted to find me? 

I trudge across the creaking wood planks of the pier, hugging my coat tighter around myself as the ocean spray splatters against my glasses, leaving me blind. Make my way quickly back towards the sand, down along the shore and towards the winding, oceanside road that just last week I had soared down on the back of a roaring motorbike, clutching my hands around a warm, hard waist. 

Now the road is empty. Still. Warm, steaming windows illuminate the dark, wet streets with golden pools of spilled over light, crowded inside with bodies seeking shelter from the cold. I must look like an idiot walking alone out in the freezing spray – not dashing inside to join them. Instead I keep walking – following the path I think we took last week backwards towards the city center, streets gradually filling more and more with people. Girls in short skirts with legs covered in goosebumps. Boys taking off jean and leather jackets to drape across their thin shoulders. 

Music blaring from underneath rattling metal doors.

I find myself at the entrance of the club. The one I entered what feels like five lifetimes ago. I have absolutely no reason to, but I push open the door, feeling the warm buzzing sweat and sound slap with a blast against my face. Feeling nothing like the cold free air did against my face only a week ago, mixed in with the gentle whips of his curls brushing on my cheeks.

I hold my breath and push through the crowd, fruitlessly searching for a tall dark head even though I know I’ll never ever find it in this place. Not in these neon lights and pulsing bodies and sequins. Not here. 

But I keep looking. Make my way to the bar this time without running into it, squeezing past the sea of bodies, glasses fogging up again in the steam.

I think of his cold fingertips pressing gently against the cut on my forehead. 

I lean forward. Yell over the noise at the bartender – clearly someone who is here to Stay. Looks like he has all the time in the world. “Excuse me,” I call out. He turns and wipes a sweaty hand through his hair. Wipes off a glass on a rag. “What’ll it be?”

I lean even farther across the bar, feet barely touching the floor. “Well actually I’m – I’m looking for someone. Was wondering if you could tell me if you’d seen him?”

He laughs once. Harsh. “Sorry, mate, if you’re looking for Van Cleave’s goodies you’re outta luck. That bastard Dispatched him last week. Put half our fucking clients here into unexpected withdrawal after it happened. Van Cleave didn’t leave any of his men the key to the safe. Waste, if you ask me.”

I swallow hard over my aching throat and try not to flinch. To blush. “See I’m – well that’s actually who I’m looking for. The man who Dispatched him.”

He smirks. Leans forward to me like we’re friends. “Oh, I see. You want to line up to take a punch at him too? Join the fucking club,” he laughs.

I nearly grab the bar in my haste. “No no no, it’s not that. I just . . . he’s a friend. And I can’t find him.”

He freezes, glass and bar rag held midair. I feel like I’ve just declared that I’m The Queen reincarnate. “Wait - who exactly are you talking about?” he asks.

I feel hot and tensed. Spine sweating just under my skin. I force myself to say the words without my voice trembling. “Sherlock Holmes,” I say.

He stares at me, and then he laughs. Sneers. Two harsh sounds echoing like splintered glass over the pounding music. “No way you just called Sherlock Holmes a friend.”

“Oi that’s a right joke if I ever heard one!”

I turn quickly to the sound of the new voice and nearly gasp. The girl from my first Visit is leaning up against the bar behind me, snickering. I see the moment in her eyes when she recognizes me, and she lowers her lids, licks her lips. “Hold on, I remember you.” She reaches forward and trails a long acrylic fingernail down my chest, between the open sides of my jacket. I don’t realize until she presses against my thin shirt how desperately I’m sweating in the club in my warm layers. How foolishly I’m overdressed.

She looks at me funny, holding my gaze. I’ve never seen that look on her face before, or anyone’s face. But I’m certain in less than a second that I don’t like it.

She leans towards me, and my nose picks up the familiar scent of her perfume, drowning out the spilled alcohol and sweat of this place. “That explains it then,” she murmurs, lips curved.

I go to ask what she means when suddenly her long fingernail is trailing down the side of my face, down my cheek. It feels nothing like Sherlock Holmes’ cold fingertips cradling the ache on my forehead. Nothing like him.

“You’re good,” she says, surprise in her eyes. “I never would have taken you for one of _those_ boys.”

My blood runs cold. I can’t breathe. 

I want to shake my head violently and yell that I’m not. That I was married to _her_. And that we had a daughter named Catherine. And that I was a doctor, for Christ’s sake. That I’m _not_.

But the memory of Sherlock’s breath is still hot and fizzling on my lips. I stay silent.

“Loosen up!” she cries, shoving my arm. “Jesus, this may be the eighties but we’ve all lived past this point in the World, you know. Your lot aren’t being chased down out on the streets anymore,” she says.

I almost laugh. My lot still _are_ being chased down on the streets. The soldiers like me who held guns in our hands. The soldiers like me who killed because we were told to. Killed without being told why. Fields of blood.

The bartender suddenly leans forward. I feel as if I’ve missed a conversation between him and the woman. I can see the sweat pouring down his neck, mixing with a trail of glitter.

“You didn’t tell me you were _looking_ for Sherlock Holmes, mate,” he grins. “Christ, that’s a whole different boat of trouble you’ve got yourself in.”

The woman laughs, high and tinkling. “Look here – actually what’s your name?”

I don’t hesitate. Don’t even blink. “Matt.”

“Look here, Matt,” she says again, drawing me close like she’s about to whisper a secret in the high school hallway. “I know you’re new around this city, so let us fill you in. Sherlock Holmes may look good enough to eat. But if you have any bloody sense, you stay the fuck away from him.”

“Yeah, unless you want to find your own ass Dispatched.”

“He doesn’t have friends –”

“He certainly doesn’t fuck –”

“And he’s the last person here you should worry yourself about looking for.”

I cough and clear my throat, feeling formal in the midst of chaos. My mind races and reels – like I’m drowning in their words and don’t know which way is up. Which way is air.

“You don’t understand,” I say. I struggle to find the right words. The right way to say, “he brought me back from the dead” without sounding like an absolute lunatic. The right way to say, “he almost kissed me and I _wanted_ it” without saying anything even remotely close to those words.

I try again. “He was just kind to me is all,” I say.

The bartender laughs again. “That’s just his sick game, mate.”

“Manipulates anyone and anything to get what he wants. Gets people he doesn’t like kicked out while the rest of us stick around here and suffer for it. Finds the life of the party that week and Dispatches them, just to bloody irritate the rest of us.”

I’m ten steps behind. I’m failing. “No, no. That’s not what he’s –”

“You know he’s just a Visitor, right? He doesn’t Stay.”

The question stops me in my tracks. My brain spins, trying to think of a moment when Sherlock’s wrist alarm had ever gone off. It hadn’t.

“But he doesn’t have a time limit,” I say, voice desperate.

They look at each other and share an odd grin, and my heart churns hotly in my chest. Thick nausea.

“That’s because he never leaves,” the girl whispers behind her hand. 

The bartender nods, eager. “All you Visitors who get three hours a week here? That’s the amount of time he spends in the World, but he ain’t dead. Crazy fucker spends nearly his whole life in here, fucking around with all of our lives who are Staying instead of just living his own life most of the week in the World like a normal person.”

“But how is he allowed to –”

“I told you, Matt. He manipulates people for whatever he wants. And what he wants is to stay here and make us all miserable. It’s like a game to him – Dispatching left and right, watching us all pick up the pieces.”

“He isn’t right in the head,” the bartender finally says. “All that time in here when you’re still alive in the World – it does shit to you. He ain’t right.”

The girl puts her hand on my shoulder, palm hot through my clothes. “You seem an alright bloke, Matt,” she agrees. “We just don’t want you getting yourself fucked over, is all.”

The bartender nods. “Stop looking for him,” he says seriously. Then, “come on, have a drink and stay. What’ve you got, an hour left?”

I need to escape more than I even know how to articulate. I need to find silence. To breathe. Their words blast through my brain like ricocheting bullets, churning the life inside me into thick, choking confusion.

They’re staring at me strange. Wondering why I haven’t said anything. Why I haven’t moved. Haven’t thanked them.

“Thanks, but – I have to go,” I finally mutter. I can’t even shoot them a smile as I go. I whip around and start to press through the thronging mass of dancing bodies, sweat and glitter and hairspray dripping onto my jumper and skin. I can feel their stares burrowing into my back. Can see their open mouths in my mind. 

I make it out of the club and slam the door behind me with a gasp, holding back the explosion of noise and heat against my back. The new silence buzzes around me sharply, prickling across my skin. It feels dead and heavy. Led weight.

I walk numbly down the familiar wet alleyway, farther away from the noise. I twist and turn through the winding streets, eyes on my feet, choosing my path by whichever direction will take me past less people. 

I tell myself that I have somewhere to go, just like all the people walking purposefully around me. I tell myself that I’m not alone again. 

And suddenly I’m right. There’s a prickling on the back of my neck as I reach the end of a new street – one that had been blessedly empty. Hairs standing up on edge. Senses quivering.

I whip around quickly and my eyes catch sight of movement just at the end of the road. A flicker of black coat disappearing around the corner. A blurred head of twisting, black curls. 

Heart in my throat I run. I sprint. Flying past houses with warm windows blazing just inside, tearing around the corner with my shoes skidding harshly on the wet, black asphalt. He’s flying ahead of me, eating up the street in great gulps with his black coat flying out behind him, caught in the lights from the stars.

“Sherlock wait!” I yell. He doesn’t stop. Doesn’t hesitate. I chase him as fast as I can, breath wheezing. Chase him farther and farther back towards the smell of the ocean, closer and closer to the sea. I chase him for what feels like miles – barely hanging on as he flies around each unexpected turn. Barely keeping sight of his bright, pale skin.

Just when we almost reach the road by the pier he leaps around a corner into the fog. I follow him, seconds later, and see him running up the steps to an old house in the distance, sitting small and unassuming at the edge of the beach, just beyond the reaches of the starlight. 

I sprint as fast as I can. Call out his name again. He’s flinging open the front door just as I hear a sound that makes me want to scream.

 _Five_ , then _four_. . .

I dig deep and run faster, legs flying, feet pounding, ocean spray plastered against my glasses.

Then _three_ . . .

I’m nearly to the door now. Nearly there to catch him before he slams it shut in my face.

 _Two_. . .

Then I’m gone.

 

\--

 

_One week later_

I have an insane idea.

“Same Time as usual, Dr. Watson?” the nurse asks, thin fingers already reaching for the Device with the other hand steadying my cheek.

I reach up and hold her wrist, stopping her before the Device can reach my forehead. She frowns.

“Actually, I –” I stop mid-sentence. Sometimes I forget that my voice still sounds like this. Warbled and raspy and weak. It frightens me.

I clear my throat and try again, hoping to sound less like a crumpled up bag. “Actually I was thinking I might try a different Time. The nineties.”

Her mouth drops open before she can remember to keep it shut, eyes glittering as she tries to think of what to say. As if I don’t realize all these minutiae of her facial expressions. As if I don’t know how to feel.

“Well –” She swallows hard, fingers gripping the Device. “You tested as a ninety-nine percent match for the eighties during your Enrollment, Dr. Watson,” she says slowly. “I’m not sure you’ll find anything in the nineties that suits you.” 

I think of Sherlock Holmes slamming the door in my face. I think of him hiding now – Time Jumping. Thinking that he can pretend he didn’t almost press his mouth to mine. Thinking he can pretend he didn’t breathe life into my dead veins. Resurrect me.

I think of how I need to feel the warmth of his hand in mine. Just one more time before I die – one more.

I smile so that there’s an old man twinkle in my eye and settle back into my chair. “Well,” I say, “it never hurts to try something new does it? Just this once.”

She smiles at me like I just invented ice cream. “You’re very right, Dr. Watson. It never hurts.”

She keeps smiling as she adjusts the Device in her fingers before reaching up to place it on the side of my forehead, once again steadying my cheek with her hand. “Three hours, as usual,” she reminds me unnecessarily. 

I close my eyes, and I breathe over the nausea, and I’m flying. Soaring. 

Gone.

-

I open my eyes in the Exit Point. The edges of the room slowly fade into focus, and I gasp as I realize where I’m standing. I’m in my old army barracks – half unzipped duffel bag strewn on the floor next to the thin Army-issue mattress sagging on the metal cot in the corner.

I almost slap myself in the forehead when I realize. Of course my Exit Point room looks like this in the nineties. Because I wasn’t a part of the nineties. Not like most people. They were listening to grunge and watching Prime Suspect and EastEnders while I ran across the other side of the world with a gun in my arms, marking myself as one of the Devil. Marking myself as a person who’s not allowed to visit Time. Blood-soaked hands.

I’m here, though. At the threshold. There’s a shining mirror in the corner – one that beckons me with gleaming light. A present for me for my fifth Visit. It calls.

I walk towards it on shaking legs and stand before it with my eyes closed. Steeling myself. When I open them I throw my hand over my mouth and gasp. 

I’m thirty-two. I’m vibrant and bold, thick hair in my short military cut and muscles bulging underneath my plain t-shirt. Blue eyes sparkling without wrinkles sagging over them. Skin tight.

I look handsome.

Hot tears brim at the back of my eyes. It’s no wonder they don’t let you have a mirror until you’re used to it all. Until you have it in your head that you’ll always have to go back to the World when the time on your wrist is up. Not until you decide to Stay. 

Because the sight of me there, strong and young and free – I want to throw myself to the mirror and protect the man standing before me. I want to drop to my knees and beg him. Don’t follow the Draft and go. Don’t pick up that gun in your hands. Don’t tell Catherine that you’ll take her to the park another day. Don’t stay at your desk instead of holding her hand across the street. Because if you stay working at your desk and leave her to cross the street alone, that’s the last time you’ll ever see her with her eyes open.

I walk forward on numb legs and press a trembling hand to the glass, touching my own reflection as a tear slips free from the corner of my eye. Then I suddenly remember that I didn’t cry in the nineties. I was hard and terrifying. Brutal and cold. A killer. 

I sniff hard and wipe a rough hand over my face. Reach for the glasses on the dresser and realize they aren’t there. I switched to contact lenses in 1989. I rip my eyes away from the mirror, knowing that the time is ticking down on my wrist. Then after a sturdy breath I fling open the Exit Point door and fall, tumbling in a void towards the alley where I know I’ll land. 

-

I crash to the ground, for the first time unsteady on my feet in this place. I rise to stand as the now-familiar metal door rattles next to me, this time with a nineties beat humming through the ground. It makes me think of crowding near a radio out in No Man’s Land, hearing these Billboard top hits for the first time in the middle of the choking, blood-soaked sand. 

The air here is thick and grungy. No glitter or hairspray floating on the wind – no bright punk bubblegum kiss on my tongue. I look up to the stars – the same ones that floated over me in the eighties. The same ones that float over me in the World. I look up at them and think of his eyes and start running on my itching feet, flying around corners and dashing down streets and peeking in every bar and restaurant and club I can find. Searching every corner of the moonlit pier.

I search and I search and I search. I pass the same Cinema playing different films, and the same diners with different menus, and the same clubs playing different music. Lines of people in different clothes. Girls running after taxis with their black boots in their hand instead of glittering heels. 

I search for two hours and fifty-eight minutes. 

And when my lungs are burning, and my legs are numb, and I haven’t yet caught any glimpse of a tall dark head of curls, I find myself dragging my heavy legs back towards the darkened old house by the beach. And the front door creaks open as the alarm on my wrist starts to blare into the salty silence. 

And as I reach _five_ , then _four_ , then _three_ , my eyes catch a glimpse of starlit porcelain skin slowly peering out from the pitch-black doorway, surprise written all over his face.

And as I reach _two_ I call out his name, echoing over the frozen sand.

And as I reach _one_ he takes a step forward.

I move to do the same, then I’m gone.

 

\--

 

_One week later_

My hand shakes on the smooth wooden railing, sturdy and overlooking the roaring ocean down below. The sky above me melts into pinks and purples. It drips down slowly like melting clouds into the frothy waves. Drips down over my thin and wrinkled skin, shivering in the evening air.

Today is Saturday. The day I should feel thrilling and excited and alive. I should have been waiting inside pacing the halls since lunchtime – waiting for the moment when they call my name and tell me it’s my turn for Time. All day I should have been dreaming of how it feels to walk across sturdy ground. How it feels to run with the wind in my face and feel the earth underneath my smooth hands.

Instead I feel numb. 

Last week was a mistake, I know that now. Stupid and foolish to go chasing after a man who clearly doesn’t want to be found. Not in any place, or any decade. Not in Time. 

And I feel like an idiot. Pathetic and young. Because the thought of never seeing him again in my life shouldn’t leave me feeling so tiny and cold – withering away as the cancer gnaws numbly at my bones. Stripped bare and raw. 

I barely know him. I know nothing at all. Just a name and a face and the shape of his hipbones as they vibrate on top of a motorbike, warm and firm under my palms. Just the taste of his breath and the glint in his eyes and the way his voice sounds when he’s calling my name into an empty, fog drenched square, like he’s terrified that I won’t appear alive out of the mist.

I just know that he ran from me two weeks in a row. I know what his front door sounds like slammed in my face.

I realize I’m not even seeing the ocean in front of me as I cling to the railing and think. Instead my eyes see dense, foggy streets, thrumming and alive. Adventurous alleyways pulsing with sound. 

Black curls.

And I’m watching myself in my mind’s eye standing alone, chasing after a ghost like an absolute fool. A ghost they all told me wasn’t right in the head. A ghost who doesn’t want someone chasing after him. Not me.

I’ve made up my mind. I won’t go back. Five Visits was enough, in my book, I think. 

I grip the railing one last time and turn to move back into the fluorescent din of the Home when suddenly it happens. A metal tray clatters to the floor somewhere behind me, and my veins explode waiting for a War bullet to tear through my skin, and when I next open my eyes I’m splayed on the ground, leg on fire and eyes watery and the sky above me crowded out by a sea of concerned young faces – all of them talking at once.

“Are you alright, Dr. Watson?”

“Dr. Watson can you hear us? Are you ok?”

“Keep breathing, Dr. Watson, you’re alright. You’re safe.”

“Don’t move, Dr. Watson, you’ve just had a bit of a fall.”

‘Just had a bit of a fall’ my ass. 

My body is screaming on the floor. Tense like tar. I feel hands all over my skin. See scared faces. Wary eyes glancing back and forth like they’re scared. Scared _of_ me and not _for_ me as I whimper on the floor like a useless old blanket.

The realization slams into me with such sharp force that I nearly cry out in pain.

They all know. They’ve always known.

I see it now in their eyes and want to vomit over my own stupidity. My own willful, cataract blindness where I somehow thought I was a soldier who’d slipped through the cracks. Where I thought like an idiot that it wouldn’t be highlighted in big bold red in my papers and records: “Fought.” 

Where I thought since the first time one year ago where they sat me down and handed me a pamphlet for Time that they didn’t know I used to hold a gun in my hands. That I wasn’t a man who the majority would say should be locked up for life. Convicted.

They’re scared of me now as I lie on the floor, yelling and flinching through my memories of the past. And a second realization rolls through me with such a sickening roil I realize I’d do _anything_ to go back for another Visit. I’d sell my soul or lose my left arm or tell them to just let me die and Stay, here and now.

Because now I also realize that I look so pathetic, so unbearably weak and small, that this whole Home thought I should get an exemption. That I’m so useless they all thought “What could be the harm in letting poor old, Dr. Watson walk without a limp again in Time? He’s no longer dangerous. Just look at him. Give him a go.”

Suddenly I want to be dangerous. 

They’re helping me to my feet, cold, thin hands all over my wrinkled arms. I reach out and grab the nearest wrist I can reach, startling the nurse so badly she steps back and yelps.

“Please still let me Visit,” I say frantically, not caring. “Please let me go. Let me Visit.”

I feel the whole world is holding its breath, watching this sad sight unfold. My body is in pain, and my eyes are blurred, and I feel I might sink back down and weep if she says no.

I think of the wind in my face as we sped through streets on a racing motorbike, with velvet black curls against my cheeks. 

The nurse recovers and takes my hand, trying to mask her fear. A sick, twisted part of me is glad she’s afraid of me. It means I’m not completely limp and old.

She stammers. “I don’t – I don’t think –”

Another nurse jumps in, giving her a look which he thinks I can’t see. The look says “he’s becoming too dependent on the Visits.” The look says “we shouldn’t let him go. He’s unstable.”

“Look here, Dr. Watson,” he starts to say. “It really isn’t such a good idea after a fall like you’ve just had. You need to stay here in the World to recover. You really should let yourself rest –”

“I’m begging you,” I say, shame hot on my face. “Please I’m begging you. Just for an hour.”

I look desperately to the nurse on my left – the main one who gives me the Device each Saturday. The one with the Protest pin. 

“Please,” I whisper to her. My eyes are wet. “Please, I just want to walk.”

Her bottom lip crumples, and relief washes over me. I know that she’s going to say “yes.”

She guides me gently to my chair back inside away from the swarm of shocked nurses and other residents, walking so slowly she’s almost a statue beside me as I hobble on shaking knees. I creak forward inch by inch with one hand gripping my cane – chest wheezing in sharp, thick pain. She lets me do it myself. Doesn’t get a wheelchair. And for that I am eternally grateful.

When I finally sink down in my chair with a groan she sinks to her knees beside me, brushing sweat-soaked thin hair back from my forehead. 

Her eyes are the same color as Catherine’s once were. Almost the same color as _her’s_. Somehow I’ve never noticed this fact before.

She waits until I’ve caught my breath before speaking softly, just so that no one else can hear. “You yelled out something about ducking for cover on the balcony,” she says. “Do you remember?”

My face burns, and I shake my head no. I don’t even remember the fall, or the landing. Just the feeling of the smooth wood railing under my hand, then the sound of an exploding bomb crackling through the silence with a scream.

Her lips twitch softly, and she looks down at my winkled hand in hers. Gnarled blue veins surrounded by her skin like pure cream. She looks at our hands for a long time. So long I think maybe she’ll go back on her decision. So long that I start to daydream of starlit blue eyes – ones I know I’ll never see again.

Then she speaks. “Dr. Watson,” she begins, looking back up into my eyes. With her other hand she reaches up and removes the pin from her starched nurse’s collar, then leans forward to drop it in the wastebasket by my chair. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers. She blinks hard. “I didn’t know.”

For a moment I’m confused. Of course she knew. I see that now that my blindness has been lifted. That there’s no way in hell they could have first pressed the Device to my forehead and _not_ known that my name was blacklisted. Banned.

Then I look once more into her eyes and understand. See the words that she’s trying to say but just can’t.

That she didn’t know the War hurt me just as much as it hurt everyone left back at home to suffer.

That she didn’t know that I deserved forgiveness. That it hadn’t been my choice at all to kill.

Before I can say anything back she rises to her feet and gives me a small, wet smile, then picks up the Device in shaking fingers. She presses it to my forehead and the countdown begins. 

Her voice is raspy. “The nineties again, or --?”

I sink back into my chair, feeling light. “No,” I say smiling. “The usual Time again, please.”

She returns the smile and sniffs hard. She leans down, and I think she’s just checking the connection of the Device, when suddenly her voice sounds in my ear, soft like wind.

“I’ve turned your medications up for the pain in your leg. I’ll come back for you in the morning,” she says. She squeezes my arm. “Twelve hours.”

I’m breathless. _Twelve whole hours._

I want to thank her, but I’m gone.

-

I fling open the Exit Point door without even looking in the mirror of my old bedroom – the one with the old red flannel on the bed. Barely take the time to adjust the glasses on my face. My feet hit the alley pavement and I’m running like hell, laughing up at the stars when my legs carry me strong and steady beneath me as I sprint. As they carry me along without pain.

I won’t look for the stranger tonight, I think. I’ll run and be free and eat ice cream and be alive. I’ll run through the city until the sun starts to rise and the air feels fresh in my lungs. Run through the thronging streets and across dance floors and under the streetlights and stars just to prove to myself that I can.

Next thing I know I look up at where I’ve run to, and the elation dies thickly in my chest.

I’m by the pier.

A few scattered cars zoom past on the oceanside road behind me, winding their way along to an adventure or a rendezvous or a romantic picnic underneath the stars. Laughter echoing over the sound of car radios.

Suddenly I don’t want to run anymore. 

Without thinking I kick off my shoes and step into the cool sand with my bare feet, sighing out loud at the feeling of sinking into the shore for the first time in decades. 

_She_ had always wanted to live in cities that were far away from the coast, and the Home is too far up on the cliff to travel down to the water, and chemo patients aren’t allowed on the monthly trips in the white vans down the winding road to the sand. Too dangerous, they always say. We’ll get sick.

As if we aren’t already sick enough.

So I clench my toes into the cool, velvet grains and feel the salt spray on my face, water rippling gently in the moonlight. And I think that maybe I’ll just lay here until sunrise. Lie back in the sand for what I know deep down will be last Visit. My last ever visit to Time. And my last ever visit to the sea. The last twelve hours of pain-free peace before I go back to the World and wait to die.

I can’t keep indulging myself with these silly little Visits here. Not when Catherine never got the chance.

But I don't want to hurt here standing underneath the stars. I'll put off the memories until I'm back in the World. Until I'm hopeless and wrinkled and waiting. Right now I’m just a Visitor on his last Visit. And I’ve decided that I’ll spend it with the sea spray on my face.

Then I see him.

A black coat emerges from the shadows of the moonlight, billowing gently across the sand. Sherlock Holmes doesn’t realize I’m behind him. He can’t. Or else he’d be sprinting fast away from me – running like hell to slam a door in my face. He’s standing by the lapping waves looking out to sea, thin arms wrapped around himself against the chill in the air. Gaze steady.

Suddenly he looks so alone against the horizon. So small and fragile and singular contrasted to the velvet blanket of hundreds of millions of stars.

I walk silently towards him in the sand, closing the distance, heart thumping madly in my chest. When I’m ten feet behind him I can smell him in the air. I take a deep breath and call his name.

“Sherlock.”

He leaps around startled, eyes blown wide when he focuses on me standing in the misty moonlight, muscles tensed to run.

“Please don’t run,” I say quickly.

He looks up and down the empty beach as I take another step, and I see the fight leave his body as he realizes he’s caught. That it’s no use. No escape. With a long sigh he turns back towards the dark horizon, completely ignoring me at his back.

A challenge.

I step up next to him in the sand. Take one last look behind me at the glittering city skyline blazing at our backs, thrumming and pulsing with the living heat of a busy Saturday night.

We’re alone.

“Why are you hiding from me?” I ask.

He speaks so lowly under his breath I can barely hear him over the sound of the waves. “I didn’t think you’d come back.”

It’s not an answer to my question and he knows it. I try again. “Why do you keep running away from me?”

He’s silent for a long time. I fight with myself not to look sideways at him to see the soft curls brush across his face. To see the moonlight reflected off the waves rippling across his skin like blowing silk. I realize that I could stand there forever by his side. In a way I never felt deep down in my veins standing all those years next to _her_. In a way that only reminds me of Catherine. The way I would hold her tiny little hand in mine, sticky and warm and soft. Before she died.

Finally Sherlock speaks, and I’m frozen – breath in my throat tight and hanging on every word.

“I haven’t successfully completed any of my Work in two weeks,” he says. “Not since I Dispatched Hintley and Van Cleave.”

The unspoken “ _not since you helped me_ ” hangs in the air.

I wait. He uncrosses his arms and runs his fingers tightly through his hair, grabbing at both sides of his head with a sigh before letting his arms fall limp. “The Work is all I have.”

I look at him, frowning. “Surely that’s not true?”

He meets my gaze, and my mouth runs dry. His eyes are glittering stars in the dark. “The Work is all I have,” he says again.

I force myself to speak, feeling like I’m three steps behind without knowing why. “So you’ve just been having some bad luck?” I say in the silence. He smirks and laughs under his breath, not confirming or denying.

Suddenly a small fury lights in my gut. An indignation I haven’t let myself fully feel for years. “So what?” I go on, voice heated. “That isn’t a reason to run away when you knew I was trying to get to you. That’s no reason to slam the door in my face when I’m calling out for you. Not after everything . . . not after –”

“It _is_ if I can’t do the Work!” he grits out.

“And what the fuck does treating me like a human being have to do with your work? Huh?”

“I am treating you like a human being.”

“Bullshit you are! You can’t bring me along with you – you can’t . . . you can’t _give_ me something like that and then take it away like I’m just some stranger on the street.”

He turns towards me, eyebrow raised. “Give you? I didn’t give you anything. Nor did I take anything away.”

“But you did!” I cry out before I can stop myself. My voice sounds loud and harsh in the silence. I don’t even recognize it anymore. Not this fiery, raging thing.

I sigh and look back towards the water, feeling for some reason like I need to tell him the truth even if it’s the last words I’ll ever say to him. I feel the sea breeze on my face in the darkness, washing away some of my anger.

He’s waiting for me to speak, so finally I do, gazing out blankly towards the water and wishing somewhere deep inside that this didn’t have to be the last time I’ll feel the sea upon my face. 

But it is. Because I’ve told myself this will be my last Visit. And because I’ve signed a paper saying it is not my last wish to Stay.

“I’m not well in the World,” I say quietly. I can feel him listening beside me – body still. “I only have a couple weeks. They told me a month at most.”

“With what?” he asks quietly.

“Cancer.”

He hums beside me. “Can’t they cure that these days?”

I smile grimly and stare quickly at the ground. I’ve heard that question a thousand times before. “It’s the cancer from the War,” I explain. “They haven’t cured that one yet. Haven’t tried.”

He hums again, moving his hand gently to his pockets and loosening the tight grip of his shoulders. I ask the question before I fully decide to.

“How did you know I was a soldier?” I ask. “You know I’m not supposed to . . . my name is on the list –”

“Yes of course I know that. Everyone knows that,” he says. “Just had to look at you for thirty seconds to see it. The way you hold yourself. The way you ran and chased my suspect for me that first night. Of course you were a soldier. Only idiots can’t see that.”

I laugh quietly, despite myself. “That’s amazing.”

He’s silent, but I can feel the air changing. Shifting and softening until it’s lost some of its prickly spark, mellowing into a hush between our bodies where we stand still staring out at the waves.

I go on. “I’m sorry that I went looking for you. I know you didn’t want that. But I just . . . I’ve felt like I’m dead already, right? For years. And that night I met you I . . . well I just _ran_. Like it wasn’t anything at all.”

He shifts quietly beside me. His voice is a soft warning. One I don’t heed. “John –”

“And then that next week. It was insane,” I say, gaining momentum. “God, it was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever done. Taking out that madman and racing on your motorbike and the bullets and the pier and –” I stop before I get to ‘ _and the moment you almost kissed me._ ’

He runs his hands over his face, breathing deeply. Somehow I don’t care whether he wants to hear this or not. I keep talking, making him listen. “I felt alive. You – whoever you are – you gave that to me. So you can’t well blame me for wanting to find you again. For chasing after –”

“The people at the bar you spoke to. They told you not to come after me. That I was insane,” he interrupts.

I laugh. “Yeah, yeah they did.”

“But here you are.”

I shrug. “Here I am.” I sigh and relax, clenching my toes one last time in the sand and drinking in my last ever look at the sea, burning it into my mind. It’s time. I don’t need the full twelve hours, I’ve decided.

I turn and get ready to leave, hating the fact that I can’t fully bring myself to look at him in the moonlight, looking just beside him to the ghostly pier beyond. 

“So anyway,” I say lamely, “I guess I just wanted to thank you is all. You won’t have to deal with me bothering you again. This is my last –"

His lips are on mine in a rush. He’s kissing me. His huge hands cup my face and hold me there as he sighs softly into my mouth and tenderly brushes against my lips. He’s trembling.

My lungs burn with holding my breath. I’m terrified to move. To exhale. Terrified I’ll blow this all away into smoke. That I’ll wake up back in the fluorescent lights of the Home and realize that this was all a dream Visit – not real. That I’m still weak and hurting and surrounded by concerned and frightened faces on the floor instead of standing on the shore with a beautiful man’s lips on mine, being kissed in a way I’ve never been before in my life. 

Like I’m something that somebody wants to hold. Like I’m something that’s found and fragile.

He pulls away gently, and I sway forward into his warmth. The sides of his long coat wrap around my body in the breeze, shielding me from the mist that clings to my bones and cloaking me in heat. He stares down into my eyes and cups my face and looks like he’s never been more surprised in his life. The moment hangs and tingles between us. Breaths held and eyes locked and noses just a hair away from touching.

Then he whispers my name and crashes his lips to mine once more, gripping my thick, soft hair in his fingers and moaning into my mouth. Licking inside.

I kiss back fiercely. Cling to the fabric covering his chest and push into his mouth and groan at the electric brush of his wet, smooth skin against mine. Suddenly I’m the person I’ve always wanted to be and never have been: someone daring. 

Suddenly I’m doing the thing I’ve always wanted to do and never did: kissing a man.

He plants one last kiss at the corner of my mouth, breathing hard, and presses his forehead to mine, enclosing me in the warm space of his body. His curls whip against my forehead in the breeze and I shiver, drawing myself closer to his chest.

“You’ve complicated matters, John Watson,” he says breathlessly.

I chuckle despite myself. “How is that?”

He presses another kiss to my forehead, long and soft. It shivers across my skin like warm water dripping from the top of my skull, coating down the length of my body towards the sand. “I was hiding from you,” he says quietly.

I stand there frozen and wait. Listen to the sound of the waves and his pulse.

He sighs and goes on. “I’ve always worked alone.”

I reach up and hold one of his wrists loosely between my fingers, feeling young and bold. “Until me,” I say.

He smiles and I feel his lips curve against my forehead. “Until you.”

I pull back and look at him. Suddenly I understand. “You didn’t anticipate this,” I squeeze his wrist. “You didn’t want it. So you were scared.”

He hums, letting his lips brush just underneath my hair. “Terrified.”

He holds me closer in his arms, and suddenly it physically aches in my chest to think I might not feel this again. Odd that I hadn’t felt this pain at all when I had first signed my name on the black dotted line, one hour after returning from my disastrous first Visit.

I can’t think about it.

I shut my eyes and breathe in a lungful of his scent. Feel awash in how familiar it is in my bones. Just like it’s always been there hiding. Waiting for me to tear off the veil with gentle fingers. He is as familiar to me as the fresh, young skin I first saw when I looked down at my hands in the alleyway in the moonlight. And as bittersweet as the color of Catherine’s eyes before they closed.

He runs a thumb over my cheek. It swishes against my skin softly like the sound of the waves, lapping their froth across the shore. “You probably don’t have much time left,” he whispers.

I remember that he doesn’t know yet that I have twelve glorious hours.

I grin, not feeling in the least like I need to end our embrace. Not feeling any sense of unease creep into the corners of my mind as he holds me. I’m not afraid.

“I had an. . accident. Right before this Visit,” I say. “Someone dropped something loud and I –” I pause. I have no idea how to articulate what happened. I’ve never felt brave enough to explain it out loud before.

He fills in the blanks. “You had a War flashback.” No judgement. And best of all, no pity.

I nod. “They were all scared of me – the nurses. But my main nurse understood.” I lean forward against his chest. “She told me right before I left that she gave me a whole twelve hours.”

He sucks in a breath, surprised. “Twelve hours?”

His arms wrap their way tighter around me, and he kisses the top of my head. It feels wonderful. No one’s ever done that to me before. _She_ would never have been able to reach.

I want to take his hand and ask him to take me home and let me know his body. Say “let’s just have this ten hours or whatever we have left and enjoy each other. Just enjoy.”

But first I need to know.

“Sherlock,” I say. I take a slow step back, body thrumming from the loss of his warmth. I look into his glittering eyes as his curls blow softly across them, making them twinkle like the stars above our heads. Facts try to slot into place in my head, like puzzle pieces that almost fit but just barely don’t – edges smashing. 

“Why don’t you have an alarm?” I ask. “You’re still alive in the World. They told me. But you’re here, and you have this house, and you don’t have a pain monitor.” I stop before the questions pour out of me unending. I lick my lips and touch the hollow of his pale throat with my thumb. “Why?”

The flicker I see through his eyes is such a great, heaving sadness that it nearly knocks me breathless. Then in a flash it’s gone. Replaced by something calm and warm, the smooth, uncomplicated emotion of desire.

“It’s not really important,” he says lightly. He runs his cold thumb slowly across my lower lip. I barely resist the urge to lick the tip with my tongue. My eyes are huge and fixed on him. “Later,” he whispers.

I know a lost cause when I see one. And suddenly, I don’t give a shit. 

I just _want_.

I press my lips gently into his thumb, letting the tip of my tongue flicker out to wet the pad. He shivers up his neck. Sucks in a breath. There’s a question hovering in his eyes. One that looks a lot like “you really want this? You really want me like this?”

I answer the question on his face with a nod. A breathless, whispered, “yes.”

He grabs my hand and tears down the sand, looking back and laughing at me as I trip over myself trying to follow. He pauses to kick off his shoes, shucks off his coat and drops it on the ground, then he runs down towards the waves on the shore, looking like a little kid and nothing like the guarded man in black stalking through alleyways. Looking like youth and strength and joy itself. Looking like sunlight in the misty, black fog.

I’m smiling, and my body isn’t in pain. 

And I follow him.

We wet our feet in the freezing shallows. Gulp down icy air and laugh at each other as we run from the incoming rush of the waves. As it wets the bottom of our trousers and reflects the moonlight off our fresh, young skin. I am even more alive than I was clinging to his hips on a motorbike. Even more alive than I was when I first took a breath on my infant lungs in the World, eighty-five long years ago.

He leads me. Takes my hands and laughs as we run with abandon in the waves like kids. He leads me towards his house – warm and safe from the strong wind billowing down the beach. He doesn’t slam the door in my face. He opens it for me. Leads me inside where soft lamplight lights our path. A private universe. He presses me gently back against the wall and whispers my name and caresses my mouth with his. Tasting my sighs. 

I suddenly realize that I have never been kissed before. Not like this.

He runs his warm hands up and down my arms and breathes life into my skin. Slowly peels off my layers and unbuttons my shirt and looks at me like he can’t even believe I exist. Here, in his arms, in his home. Here in Time.

I think one last time of my shaking, wrinkled hand signing the paper that said “I, John Watson, choose not to Stay in Time when I die. I choose to fade from the earth into nothing.” Think of how I remembered the color of Catherine’s eyes as I signed it. How I knew I wouldn’t see those eyes in Time. Not ever again.

I think of this one last time as Sherlock’s warm lips move up the side of my throat. As his hands grip my sides through the thin cotton of my undershirt, begging me to touch him and be touched.

Then I cup his face and kiss him back and forget about everything but the feel of him on my skin. The sounds he makes as we let ourselves join.

He leads me towards his bed – soft, white sheets overlooking the ocean outside through spilling windows. We take off our trousers and pants unashamed. He lays me down and presses his naked body against mine, letting me run my hands up the warm muscles of his spine. His hips and shoulder blades and collar bone and thighs. He’s solid and heavy in my arms. I feel his lungs heave underneath his creamy skin.

He pulls back from our kiss and moves to pull off my shirt – the last item of clothing remaining between us – when I freeze. My wet lips feel cold in the still air of the room without his warm skin to cover them. For the first time since I felt his lips crash into mine under the moonlight, I feel exposed.

He pauses above me, lifting his body slightly off of mine so I no longer feel the hard press of his desire growing gently in the dip of my hip. He runs his fingers through my hair as I try to relax my muscles. Try to feel less like I’ll shatter apart if he removes my shield of thin cotton t-shirt from my stomach and chest.

I can’t talk, but he reads the thoughts on my face effortlessly. As if he’s had decades of practice.

“There’s a scar,” he says. It’s not a question.

I nod, cringing at the word said out loud in his beautiful bedroom. Ugly and raw in what was once a safe and comforting air. Making his crisp white sheets feel dirty.

He places his hand on the center of my chest, right above my racing heartbeat. I think he’s going to say not to worry. That I can keep my shirt on, can keep my secrets, and we’ll just continue on as before. Forget it ever happened. No problem.

Instead he frowns, gently rubbing a small circle over the fabric. “It’s not healed when you Visit?” he asks.

I blink hard and stare up at the ceiling, willing my bones to feel loose again. Already missing the way I’d run breathlessly after him out on the sand. Carefree. “No,” is all I can whisper.

He leans down and kisses me softly, halting the rest of my explanation in my mouth and warming the ice in my lungs. His lips are like silk. “Can I see?”

My body responds immediately – the last thing I ever would have expected myself to do. Somehow, for some reason, I nod. 

He smiles softly, reaching down to gently lift the glasses from my face. I’d forgotten I was even wearing them. I blink hard as he places them on the bedside table, getting used to the fact that I no longer feel their comforting weight on the bridge of my nose. Then before I can think of ten thousand reasons not to I sit up and pull my shirt over my head in one movement, then lie back quickly with my eyes closed on the bed. Convincing myself that I’m not about to hear him leap up in disgust and dash out the door.

Instead he sighs. “Oh, John.”

I want to fade back into the bedsheets and disappear. Scream and cover myself and say “sorry” until my lips fall off. I feel a strange pressure over the scarred and gnarled skin – the only thing I can feel there ever since I was pulled half-dead from under the flaming Army tank all those decades ago, covered in fire.

I wince and open my eyes, expecting to see horror on his face or pity or both. _She_ had only seen it once – years before she knew the truth. _She’d_ taken one look and said “oh, John,” and sat back from my body with hesitant eyes until I pulled my shirt back on, ashamed. 

And I hadn’t blamed _her_ one goddamn bit.

And now I look down and see Sherlock Holmes’ lips pressed firmly onto my ruined skin, slowly tracing one of the burn scars from my hip up to my collarbone with kisses that we both know I can’t really feel.

“Oh, John,” he says again, and something inside of me finally shatters and breaks loose. There’s desire in his voice. Fascination and awe and something a lot like lust. A voice I haven’t heard in anyone since I was twenty-two. A voice I’ve never heard a man use.

I’m _alive_.

I reach down and pull him up to me and crash my lips against his. I swallow his moan, press his body into mine, caress his back and shoulders and buttocks with strong, steady hands. Smooth skin. He covers me. I reach up with no hesitation and run my thumb along the light stubble of his jaw while I kiss him. Run fingers through his curls as he sighs. Feel the hard lines of his hips rolling into me and the warm, heady thrust of his groin against mine. Run the tips of my fingers through soft pubic hair in between his beautiful, firm thighs. Let him grip me with huge hands, hold me down gently, breathe life into every inch of my skin with lips and tongue and heat.

He takes me in his wet mouth and groans deep in his chest with pleasure. Lets me hold his hair hard and thrust my hips. Lets me grip his back hard enough to bruise as we kiss, and feel his strong, trembling thighs surround me, and sigh up at the stars as he grips us both in his warm hand and kisses my nipples. Beads of sweat dripping down his back in the night.

He holds my face safe in his hands and breathes into my mouth and trembles as I touch him. As I whisper to him, “that’s it, that’s it, let go.” As he looks into my eyes looking soft and wrecked and whispers, “I didn’t know,” before he comes in my arms with a fluttering cry in the back of his throat, letting me feel him fall beautifully apart. And he reaches down and lets me push up into his warm hand. Kisses the hollow of my throat until my body pulses and I see stars, clinging to the muscles in his back.

He lets me hold him after he wipes us off with the nearest piece of clothing from the floor and covers us with the warm duvet. Rests his head on my chest and places his fingertips over my gnarled skin and nudges his warm thigh against the softness in between my legs. Heavy and sated.

I wrap my arms around his back and hold him close, feeling a growing tightness in the back of my throat as I breathe in the scent of his hair. I almost can’t breathe under the beautiful weight of holding someone like this skin to skin. It’s been painfully, achingly long.

I feel his body start to drift off to sleep, and panic grips me low in the gut.

My last Visit.

I suck in a breath preparing to wake him and tell him, heart thick and heavy. But he speaks before I can form the words. “I don’t sleep long,” he mumbles into my chest. “I’ll wake you up in time before you have to go.”

I wonder desperately if he realizes that I’ve had enough, and it’s been a good run. That that’s what I told myself before I saw him standing in the sand just hours ago.

Then I wonder even more desperately why I’m still holding myself to that decision when I have a warm body in my arms and the memory of his heated moans still playing on a loop in my head. When I still have three Visits left before my Trial ends. Before I’ll close my eyes and fade away from the earth into nothing. Just like Catherine.

I distract myself, holding him closer to my skin. “What did you mean when you said you didn’t know?”

He shifts a bit under the sheets, warm and heavy. “Didn’t know sex could be like that,” he says.

I chuckle. “So you’ve only had terrible sex up until now?”

He lifts his head and looks at me with bleary eyes, blue stars slowly coming back into focus on my face. “I’ve never had any sex up until now,” he says low.

My chest pangs. “Even in the World?”

He nods back. I’m speechless, and he reaches up to brush a strand of hair off my forehead. I want to ask him why and how and why the hell he ever chose me.

But instead he suddenly asks me, “Did you know you liked men?” 

I trace the strong lines of his jaw with my eyes. Trail my hand slowly up his side. “Yes.”

We stare at each other, and I feel that I’m missing something critical passing between us. Then he kisses my forehead for a very long time before lying back down on my chest, my arms around him. 

“I’ll wake you up before you have to go,” he says again.

I think to myself that I’ll never fall asleep. I’ll lie here and catalogue the feeling of his body on top of mine in the soft starlight. Think of how I’m going to say goodbye before the sunrise, and remember every second of how his lips felt on my skin.

But he burrows his head into the warm crook of my neck and falls asleep.

And my body feels painless and young. And I follow him.

-

I wake up to the soft press of lips on my cheek.

Sherlock stands in the grey and milky light from the window, already dressed and nodding silently at me that it’s time. I pull myself from the warm cocoon of the bed as he climbs gracefully through the large window and leaps off into the stretch of sand below, walking slowly towards the shoreline with his hands in his pockets, waiting for me to catch up.

I rush to dress and follow him, already nauseous at what I know I have to say.

I dreamt of Catherine in the night. Of the way she would hold my hand and run before me along the pavement wearing her pink fairy wings, and the way she would look back over her shoulder smiling wide and say, “Come on, Daddy!” even though my body was sagging under my limp. The one I got from the ‘housefire’ all those years ago.

And I’d dreamt of seeing her standing alone on the shore in Time, and of me chasing after her on my strong, young legs, and of her disappearing into the sea to drown before I could reach her to save her. 

I know now that I can’t come back. I have to tell him.

But when I reach him on the sand he leans down and kisses me once before turning to the horizon, shoulders touching. “I’m getting married in a week,” he says calmly. 

I stutter and whip my head towards him. “What?”

He grins – a sad little thing in the corner of his mouth. “In the World,” he says. “I’m getting married in a week.”

I can barely form a thought. Form a sentence. “But we just . . . but we –”

He looks at me and nods his head down along the shore, silently asking me to walk beside him. I do. His hands are loose in his pockets, but his shoulders are tense. “Molly would understand,” he says. 

“To a woman?” I gasp. 

He hums, eyes scanning the far distance. “Molly’s a special woman. She would understand,” he says again.

“I’m sorry I –”

“Don’t apologize,” he cuts off. He stops in his tracks and looks down at me, eyes fierce. “I’m not sorry for what happened. Are you really sorry?”

I swallow hard and watch a curl blow across his forehead. My lips feel too big for my mouth. “No, I’m not.”

He looks at me once more, and again I feel that I’m missing something critical. Then he keeps walking. We fall into step side by side, as if we’d practiced. I look quickly down at the watch on my wrist and my chest clenches tight into a fist. Ten minutes. 

My mind races. I know that I have to say goodbye. Before it’s too late. I have to turn my back on him and the sea before I disappear back to the World forever. My last Visit – just like I’d told myself.

But, _Christ_ – I want to cling to him on my knees. 

I take a deep breath, and I hear myself say, “Can I see you in the World?”

I shock myself. I have no idea where that even came from. But suddenly the idea fills me with thrilling hope. I don’t have to say goodbye to him – not here and now. I can say goodbye to the sea, and to my fresh and young skin, but just not to him. Not yet.

He huffs a soft laugh next to me – one that sounds painful and harsh. I’m not expecting that.

“You wouldn’t really like me in the World,” he finally says down to his feet in the sand.

I touch his arm. “Sherlock, that’s not true,” I say quickly. I remember what they’d told me at the club. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

He looks at me with the same heaving sadness from last night. Only this time it’s not gone in a flash – it stays. He looks at me for a long time and lets me see it all. My chest aches, but I don’t look away.

Finally he looks over my shoulder towards the sea. He swallows hard and sets his shoulders, as if he’s just made a decision. I can hear his breathing.

“John,” he says. There’s a war raging in his eyes, drenched in a quiet pain that I’d give anything to know the reason behind. He touches my arm and looks back in my eyes. 

His are wet.

“John,” he says again. “If I – if we meet in the World. If I agree to that. Will you promise me this won’t be your last Visit?”

I gasp. “How did you know?”

He doesn’t answer. His voice is shaking and earnest. “Would you promise that to me?”

I can’t speak. I feel like I’m naked on the sunrise beach – bared and exposed before everyone in Time. 

There are no words in the English language for me to express to him why I can’t come back. Why I can’t keep indulging myself and Visiting this place when in the back of my mind I know Catherine never got the chance to open her eyes again in Time. When I know that she’ll never run painless and free down the seaside shore with her pink little fairy wings flapping behind her.

Why I can’t keep coming here without her.

My wrist beeps. _Five_. . .

He grabs my hand, eyes desperate. “Please, John,” he begs.

Then _four_. . .

I hear her little voice in my head, soft and bright.

 _Three_. . .

He presses my glasses into my hand, and my entire body feels warm at his touch. He’s frantic. “Please.”

 _Two_. . .

I think of his lips pressing warmly against my scar in the moonlight.

I nod, “ok,” and his eyes are like stars. “Union Hospital,” he says in a rush.

Then _one_. . .

A single tear rolls down his cheek. He looks afraid, and I have no idea why. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

Then I’m gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More questions answered, more questions raised.
> 
> Those of you who have seen "San Junipero," please don't spoil in the comments what you think / know will happen next for those who don't know the plot! :) 
> 
> Chapter 3 will probably be up within the next 2 weeks. Thank you so much for reading, and my sincere thanks to everyone who left such lovely feedback on the first chapter. I was so delighted!


	3. I Have Kissed Honey Lips

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The journey through the hallways is a blur of silver and white. Beeping monitors and pale faces and the sharp slap of antiseptic crawling up my nose. The farther we go, the worse the patients look.
> 
> I realize that this will be very, very bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a reminder to please heed the tags! This chapter *does* contain major character death. This fic has a happy ending, I promise, but you have been warned! Also, this fic now has 4 chapters, so we still have one more to go after this. Enjoy, and practice self care <3

_Four days later_

“Right then, are you all set, Dr. Watson?”

The nurse looks nervous behind her bright smile, shining under the fluorescent lights. So am I. I grip my cane harder in my hand and nod to her, motioning that she can come and help me up from my chair.

My body screams and groans as I move. I shuffle towards the door limping hard, breath wheezing as the extra pain medication struggles to keep up. She holds my arm firmly and lets me lead, and for that I’m grateful. We pass by bed after bed of pale faces. Chair after chair of people staring into space.

And I’m one of them.

After an eternity we finally reach the hallway leading to the shining glass front doors. I haven’t been in this hallway since I first arrived at the Home in a wheelchair two years ago, confused and half out of my mind with searing pain. No one to hold my hand.

Now I grit my teeth and heave myself along and pass through those sliding doors as if I’ve just climbed Everest. Ignore the bead of sweat dripping down my forehead as I shuffle up the ramp into the gleaming white van and try not to moan out loud in relief when I finally sink into the cool leather seat. It’s ridiculous how much my body wants to die. I start to chuckle.

“Something funny, Dr. Watson?” The nurse is looking at me like I just sprouted a second head. She can’t imagine why in the hell I’d be laughing after just practically crawling through the doors for the first time in two years, like some pathetic cancerous snail.

I laugh harder.

The doors slide automatically shut around us where we sit facing each other, and the van starts to drive itself smoothly down the winding path leading its way down from the Home. I loosen my fingers on my cane and sit back with a sigh.

“I feel like I’m waiting for you to pop a dog treat in my mouth,” I say through my wheezing, shaking my head at myself.

And my nurse – the nurse who’s fed and medicated and dressed and bathed me for two whole years, she laughs for the very first time in my presence. A genuine, full belly laugh. It transforms her entire face. We laugh together, like we’ve just pulled off the greatest heist of the century, speeding away in the getaway van at a whole ten kilometers per hour.

It feels fantastic.

After a few minutes she silently reaches over and presses the button to roll down the windows, and the sea-scented breeze gently blasts against my face and ruffles through my thin hair. And I think of the way Sherlock Holmes’ curls wave in the wind. And for the first time in the World since Catherine closed her eyes, I feel happy.

-

Union Hospital is a giant white fortress of a thing. It shoots up towards the heavens like pillars made of clouds. A giant white scar in the landscape, filled with death.

I’d thought my nurse would actually faint when I’d told her that I wanted to take a visit here, right after I’d woken up in the World with the image of Sherlock Holmes’ single tear still burned into my mind.

“To Union Hospital?” she’d said, frowning. 

Because of course she was confused. No one wants to visit Union Hospital. It’s the only hospital left in the world where people go to die and not be cured. The last frontier.

“To visit someone?” she’d asked.

I’d nodded, throat inexplicably dry. “My friend - Sherlock Holmes,” I’d said for the first time ever in the World.

And she’d gone deathly pale, and swayed on her feet, and patted my arm in a daze before tearing away to stumble through the hall. “Just need to make some calls, Dr. Watson,” she’d said.

I’d had a different nurse for the next three days.

And then, without warning, she’d come back into my room this morning with an official looking paper in her hand, crisp and white. “Good news, Dr. Watson,” she’d said, a little out of breath. The circles under her eyes were dark.

She’d opened my sad little closet door and rummaged through the useless loose sweatpants and t-shirts. Rifled through and bit her lip until her elegant, thin hand rested on the sleeve of my old navy blue and grey suit. One I’d put in the pile to give away when I’d arrived here, and one I hadn’t ever known that she’d kept for me.

“This seems appropriate, doesn’t it?” she’d said.

Something in her eyes told me she knew. Knew that this was not a simple visit to a new friend. Some other old chap who I’d met at some blasting club in Time.

I’d stared at her dumbfounded. Stuttered. “How – how did you know?”

She’d smiled at me, and I’d seen the weary exhaustion in her eyes. Possibly it had always been there and I’d never been alive enough to notice. “I’ve spent the week in contact with the carers for Mr. Holmes,” she’d said. She’d brushed the dust and wrinkles from the old suit in the dreary light. “Bit of red tape – all that,” she’d said lightly, “but as long as you take some extra dosages this morning at breakfast you should be in the clear for your visit.”

She’d bit her thumb, looking at the out of style fabric in her hand. “We’ll send this to be washed, I think,” she’d said. And then she’d whisked herself out of the room like nothing extraordinary had happened. And she’d whispered from the doorway, “I hear he’s very excited to see you,” before she’d disappeared down the hall.

And now I adjust the sleeves on the fresh, clean suit, trying to ignore the way it hangs off my thin and sickly frame. I catch a small glimpse of myself. A ghost in the reflection of the gleaming white glass that surrounds Union Hospital like a shield. 

My skin is old, and my hair is thin and grey, and I look like I’m a little kid wearing his father’s suit.

And despite all of that, somehow, I look handsome.

We shuffle inside, and my cane echoes loudly across the gleaming glass floor. My nurse stands tall and proud beside me. I realize this is an achievement for her too. I’m proud of us both.

Nobody stops us and asks if we need help. It amuses me. I must look so close to death that they assume I’m a patient here just out for a loony daytime stroll in an old suit. Like I’m someone who’s lost my mind and thinks my nurse is my dead wife and still believes Margaret Thatcher is the Prime Minister. Still thinks the technology keeping me alive hasn’t been invented yet. Science fiction.

I’m in great pain. She notices. Just when I think she’s going to suggest I sit down a young woman comes barreling out from a hallway, eyes wide. 

“Dr. Watson? Dr. Watson, is that you?”

She runs towards us when I nod, white shoes squeaking on the pristine floor. She shakes my hand with a good strong grip. I like her immensely.

“So sorry I’m late. I’m Nurse Hooper.” She turns to my own nurse, the mirror image of youth. “You must be whom I’ve been speaking to this week. Nurse Harris?”

I realize with a shock that I had no idea that was my nurse’s last name. I don’t even know her first name, now that I think about it. She’s never told me. None of the nurses have. My nurse nods, and suddenly a wheelchair appears by my side, as if it emerged from thin air. My blood runs cold.

“Bit of a long trip to his ward, I’m afraid,” Nurse Hooper says.

Nurse Harris gives me a look that says, “ _I’ll walk with you the whole way there if you’d like. You don’t have to use this._ ”

But Christ, I want to see him. As quickly as possible. And I don’t want to be sweating and out of breath when I do. I sit down with a grunt, pathetically hoping it won’t ruin the pressed lines of my suit.

The journey through the hallways is a blur of silver and white. Beeping monitors and pale faces and the sharp slap of antiseptic crawling up my nose. The farther we go, the worse the patients look.

I realize that this will be very, very bad.

“You have questions, I know,” Nurse Hooper says from beside me. She doesn’t talk down to me like I’m a child. Keeps her chin high, face forward. 

“I do,” I say quietly. I have around ten thousand. 

Suddenly we reach a hallway that is absolutely still. No bedsheets rustle. No patients speak or moan. No white shoes squeak across the floors in a hurry. She stiffens beside me, and I feel my nurse behind me do the same.

I feel sick.

“Perhaps we could speak here for a moment,” Nurse Hooper says. She gestures to a table by a window. Everything is grey. My nurse waits for me to agree, as if I have some sort of choice. As if I don’t really want to just leap up and sprint down the deathly hallway and find him. Find the man who looked at me and told me I could _run_.

We all settle by the window. I wait.

Nurse Hooper clears her throat. She looks very brave. “How much do you know already?” she asks.

I shake my head, feeling naïve. “Only that he lives here,” I say. My voice sounds wet and old. “And that he doesn’t have a pain monitor.”

Her lips are sad. I feel that what she is about to say will ruin me. “Dr. Watson,” she says clearly, “Mr. Holmes is in a state which I believe you, as a doctor, might be familiar with.” She pauses, and everything halts. “You’ve heard of locked-in syndrome?”

I want to scream. Everything in me explodes in a rush. I need to find him. Need to see him. Need to touch –

“—have any questions?”

I realize belatedly that she’s still been talking. I have no idea how much I’ve missed. I clear my throat and try to speak. I push out a whispered, “no.”

She nods and rises, waiting patiently for me to groan to my feet with my nurse’s pale fingers on my suit. I wonder if I said “ _I need to find him_ ” out loud.

Without another word she leads me slowly down the still grey hallway. The only sound beside my wheezing is the steady thrumming beat of monitors, echoing in the silence with their calls.

We come to a doorway, and it slides quietly open, giving me a view of a plain slate wall. I can see just the foot of his bed. Thin feet under a crisp white sheet. Utterly still, as if he’s dead.

“Oh! He can blink,” Nurse Hooper suddenly whispers beside me. “You know, once for yes, twice for no,” she adds. She’s very nervous. I feel a hand on my shoulder that I know is my nurse, squeezing to give me some courage. Then they’re gone.

I’m alone, and the feet underneath the white sheet don’t move.

Out of nowhere I hear his warm voice in my head, clear and crisp as if he was speaking right in my ear. 

_You wouldn’t really like me in the World._

I can’t breathe. I blink hard and force myself to shuffle into the room. I know that he knows I’m there – that I’ve been hesitating. I walk straight towards his bed, watching my cane clear the path for my feet. I walk all the way to the side of his crisp white sheets.

I look up.

The muscle keeping time in my tight chest stops. His face is so still and pale. Gaunt cheekbones and thin, wrinkled skin. Veins sticking out in his long, fragile neck. Breathing tube stuck in the middle of his throat, whirring and forcing his ghostly chest to rise and fall. His beautiful thick curls are cut short, almost gone. The hair is see-through and white.

But his eyes. His eyes are exactly the same. Looking up at me with silent terror. He’s afraid.

The bed is just low enough that I could sit down. I can’t tear my eyes away from his. “May I sit?” I ask.

He blinks once.

I shuffle roughly onto the bed, feeling the thick mattress sag under my weight. I let my cane fall away against the smooth, white wall.

I look down at him. I look into his eyes. And suddenly I’m no longer afraid. 

“Hello, you,” I say. He doesn’t move. I realize I’d sell the entirety of my soul just to hear his deep voice answer back, “ _hello you, too_.” But I can’t. And neither can he.

I take in his face, every inch of this face that I think I’ve known deep down since the day I was born. His full lips are dry and chapped, and I notice a little tin of balm on the table by his bed. I’ve never felt more comfortable in my life.

“Your lips look awful,” I say. “Don’t they keep you looking presentable around here?”

He doesn’t blink.

I lean forward and take the small tin in my hands. Struggle to screw off the cap and squeeze some of the clear balm onto my bony finger. Paper thin skin. Without asking to I shuffle myself closer on his bed, then reach down and place my finger right on his lips.

I look into his eyes, wide and nervous. I look into his eyes and I slowly spread the balm across his chapped and aching lips, until they look fresh and young like the lips I know so well. Slowly, ever so slowly, the white terror fades from his eyes.

I hold my hand there on the side of his face. Gesture down quickly to my clothes with a glance. “Do I look alright, then?” I ask quietly.

He blinks once, long and slow. It is so meaningful it fills the cold, grey room with warmth.

We’re laughing again, running down a moonlit shore and dipping our toes in the freezing shallows. Running like mad through the sand.

I reach over with steady fingers and lift his fragile hand in mine. His fingers are like ice. Completely dead weight in my palm. “Can you feel anything?” I ask.

He blinks twice, but I don’t let go. I honestly feel that I can’t. I hold his hand, and I listen to the whirring of the tube sticking into his throat. I wonder how many times he’s been touched since this happened to him. Whether he gets to choose the color of the thin hospital gown drowning his bony frame. If they ever put anything beautiful on the ceiling for him to look at instead of the vast, empty grey. 

I hold his hand, and I see the great weariness in the faded blues of his eyes, and I try not to think about how it must feel to want to end your life without being physically able to pick up the gun or the pills or the poison.

And I ask, “Can I tell you about a secret thing?” He blinks once, and I hear his deep voice in my head saying, “ _Well, get on with it. We don’t have all day._ ” So I hold his hand, and I look at his eyes, and I tell him all about my first day setting foot in the War, all those long years ago. I tell him about the guns and the good memories and the fire. I tell him about the fields filled with bright red blood. And he blinks once each time I pause to try to control the emotion in my chest. Letting me know that he hears me.

An hour later we startle to the sound of a knock at the door. Nurse Hooper sticks her head in, and I imagine I can feel Sherlock’s thin hand tightening around mine. Her eyes look wet. “Just about five more minutes,” she says softly. “Then I think we need to rest.”

She means for us both. I nod to her and she ducks back out, silently sliding the door shut behind her. I can feel those five minutes ticking away inside my chest like bombs. Thick and filled with dread. Too fast.

I look back at him, and his eyes are tense. “Well now,” I say, “I just used up all that time talking about myself. Didn’t even let you get a word in edgewise.”

I imagine I can see the smallest spark in his eyes. The barest imaginary crinkling at the corners. 

I feel desperate. I lean forward and run my shaking fingers across his scalp, gliding through the barest little hints of his curls. “Do you think I look better without my glasses?” I ask.

He quickly blinks twice.

I want to laugh, but suddenly an aching sob fills my chest and threatens to spill over. I clutch his cold hand in both of mine, bringing it up to my chest. “Could you feel it if I kissed you?” I ask.

He blinks twice.

But still I lean down and lick my lips and press my mouth gently against his. His lips are still wet from the balm I rubbed over them. Cold and still – not warmed by his breath. I kiss him for as long as my body can stand bending over like that without pain, then I breathe out and kiss him once more. 

When I pull back his eyes are bright and shining, staring up at me like I’m the sun. “I think my nurse wants us to get lunch,” I say lamely. For some reason I ask, “Can you eat?”

He blinks twice, and I can hear him responding “ _obviously not_ ” plain as day in my head. I blink hard and shake my head. “Sorry, I’m an idiot,” I mutter with a small smile, and he blinks once to agree. I don’t want to go.

I lean down and press one more kiss to his forehead. “Can I come see you again before we leave?” I ask. “Would you wait for me before you go back to Time?”

He looks up at me, and I can see the great pain in his mind. I hold his hand, waiting, and finally he blinks once. I hear footsteps echoing down the hall, and I whisper, “I’ll be back, Sherlock.” Then I’m rising to my feet with a groan and grabbing for my cane to shuffle out of the room. Leaving him behind in his cold, grey world. Forcing myself not to look back.

Or I’ll never leave.

-

“What happened to him?” I ask her.

I need to know. I need to know so badly that it burns in my veins. How long he’s had to suffer like this. How long he’s been trapped.

How long he’s been able to escape it all in Time.

Nurse Hooper pauses midway through her sip of coffee across the cheap white hospital table. My own nurse has been commandeered by a strapping young man in a white doctor’s coat. Inwardly I’m cheering her on.

Nurse Hooper finishes her swallow and sets her cup down. She seems to be at war with herself. She bites her lip, then finally says, “Yes, I think he’d want you to know.”

I want to reach across the table and shake her shoulders and beg her to stop thinking and just _tell_ me. Instead I wait patiently. Hands folded.

“Mr. Holmes – actually it feels odd to call him that. Do you mind if I call him Sherlock?”

I shake my head, just a smiling and pleasant old man, and she goes on. “Well, as I’m sure you know, Sherlock’s brilliant. A genius, actually. Graduated with honors in Chemistry at Cambridge two years early, and then he was on a fast track to join the police service. Forensics.”

I chuckle, picturing a whizzing young Sherlock Holmes dashing down the Cambridge hallways with a chemistry beaker in his hand. Solving mysteries and shoving people out of the way who stood in his path. Fearless and brilliant.

“That sounds like him,” I say.

She shares my smile, but then her eyes grow cold. “I think it was hard for him,” she says quietly. “Being so. . apart from everyone. He took . . .” She stammers. “There was a . . .well, one night he –”

“Was it drugs?” I ask.

A strange relief passes over her face. I guess it’s because she doesn’t have to say the ugly word. “Yes,” she says with a rush. “It had been a problem for years, apparently, but one night something happened.” She pauses, and the silence feels heavy and thick. Like I’m somehow involved.

She starts again, looking everywhere in the room but my face. “From what I can gather, there was a bit of an argument. Something with his family.” She finally brings herself to meet my gaze, and I feel my blood run cold. “I think he told them,” she says. She looks at me meaningfully. “I think he told them he was . . . gay. It didn’t go well.”

I have no idea what my face looks like. I’ve forgotten I’m even an old man sitting in a ridiculous wheelchair in an outdated suit. All I can think about is his heartbroken face. The brilliant fire gone from those eyes.

“So he overdosed,” I fill in.

She nods, gripping her cup.

I ask, even though I desperately don’t want to know the answer. “How old?”

She gives me a grim look. She knows I won’t like it. 

“Twenty-two.”

The air leaves my lungs in a rush. I’m in a void. Decades and decades of lying there trapped. Decades and decades of vast, grey ceiling. Decades and decades of silence.

I can barely get out the words. “When did they . . . when was Time first possible?”

She knows what I’m trying to ask. Her face brightens a bit, and I can’t figure out why. “Oh! Let’s see, he finished the prototype for Time about. . . well actually it was long before my time. Probably around thirty or forty years ago. But then he still toyed with it for a few decades until we made it an official option for anybody eleven years ago. Made it completely safe and ready to go. For people like you,” she adds.

The words coming from her mouth slot in slow motion into my useless brain, trying and failing to make sense. I lick my lips and stare at her, desperate to feel less stupid and old. “Wait, you said . . . ‘he’ finished the prototype.” My hands are shaking. “Who is ‘he’?”

She stares at me, mouth half open. “Sherlock,” she says slowly. Then her eyes suddenly widen, and she clasps her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no. Oh, I’m so sorry,” she gushes. She toys with her long brown ponytail in her hand, worrying the edges on her lips.

“God,” she goes on. “I’ve worked with him for so long – for Sherlock, I mean. And we’re so close. I forget that that isn’t really known beyond this place. Well, nurses know. Like your nurse knew.” She adds when I still stare at her, “That Sherlock invented Time.”

Everything in my life flips instantly upside down. I don’t even recognize my own voice. “He _invented_ it?”

She smiles, and a brilliant light flashes into her eyes. “I told you he was a genius,” she says. “Oh, but please don’t say anything. It’s part of his contract to remain completely anonymous. Part of his contract with the government. I don’t agree with all of that but–”

“How did he do it?” I interrupt. I’m sitting on the edge of my seat so far I might fall off at any moment. I don’t give a shit.

Her smile grows wider. I can tell that she’s wanted to talk about all of this for years. Wanted to have a willing audience so she could brag about Sherlock Holmes.

“We have computers for people like him,” she answers. “Ones you can use with your eyes. He wrote the code letter by letter by blinking. Took him years to even dream up the idea. By the time someone finally taught him how to use one of those systems he had it almost entirely worked out in his head.” She pauses. “He’d never been able to communicate at all before that. He learned to blink again to use it. It took him almost two years.”

“To write the code?” I ask.

“No, to learn to blink.”

I feel like a fish out of water, gasping for air. I see him running through the streets of the city – _his_ city. See him using his Dispatcher in the cold, dark fog and walking along his stretch of beach in the fresh, clean air of sunrise. I see him flying down the pier on his motorbike. Thick black curls in the wind.

Before I can answer another nurse walking past bumps into Nurse Hooper’s arm. “Sorry about that, Molly!” they call back.

My brain stops again. I point at her like I’m just a schoolchild. “ _You’re_ Molly?” I cry.

The brightness dies in her eyes. “Ah, so you’ve heard about that?”

I nod. I’m unable to speak. I feel as if I’ve just been told that oxygen is poisonous.

She reaches forward hesitantly and places her hand on my wrist. Her soft fingers are warm, and her voice is low and gentle. “You know that there isn’t a cure for him?” she says. My doctor’s brain tells me to nod yes, so I do. She smiles grimly, just at the corner. “He’s wanted to go for a long time. To go and finally Stay.”

I fight the urge to leap up and run to his bedside. Make sure he doesn’t somehow have the pills in his useless hand.

She goes on. “His family have cut ties with him since that night. They won’t sign the paperwork for us to turn off his support.”

The answers slot into place in my mind. Thick and sluggish like molasses. Terrifying and filled with dread.

“But a spouse can,” I say.

She nods. “A spouse can.”

I understand. “He wants to die the day you get married. Once you sign the paperwork,” I say. It isn’t a question.

She shrugs her shoulders helplessly and looks down at her hands. “I care about him,” she says, and she sounds incredibly sorry. 

Suddenly everything bursts in my mind – illuminating every corner of the dreary hospital with light. I have the most wonderful idea.

I grab Nurse Hooper’s hand and startle her, leaning forward onto the rickety table in my haste and spilling fat drips of her coffee. “Please, I need you to find my nurse,” I say. “Please, tell her it’s urgent.”

-

My nurse – Nurse Harris – places her hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure about this, Dr. Watson?” she asks for the thousandth time. “You only have three Visits left, and this would count . . .”

“I’m sure,” I say again. “I’m very, very sure.”

She sighs and reaches behind me to adjust the pillows along my back, pausing to smooth down the collar of my suit jacket. I’m sitting in the chair beside Sherlock’s bed. They’ve said that I can still hold his hand.

He’s asleep.

“It’s the oddest thing to see him asleep in the World,” Nurse Hooper says from his bedside. “He only ever sleeps in Time. But he fell asleep just a few minutes after you left earlier today.”

For some reason that simply fact fills me with warmth.

My nurse holds the Device gently by my forehead, rolling it between her fingers as I settle. “Location?” she asks me.

“His house,” I say.

Nurse Hooper leans forward. “It’s the old one by the pier. The one with the windows,” she explains.

My nurse nods understanding and adjusts the Device, then places it on the side of my forehead. I can feel it glowing warm, and the countdown starts. 

“Ten minutes, Dr. Watson,” she says with sad eyes. “You know that that’s all I can give you away from the Home.”

I nod, squeezing Sherlock’s cold fingers in my hand as Nurse Hooper adjusts his own Device by his forehead. “Ten minutes is more than enough,” I say.

I listen to the whirring of the breathing tube in his throat, mixing with the quiet sound of the beeping - the only two signals that the hand in mine is alive. I run my thumb over the back of his fingers. Lean back and look up one last time at the ceiling he’s looked at for decades.

Then I’m gone.

-

Sherlock Holmes stands before me at the edge of the shore, hands folded gently in his pockets. Fresh white shirt billowing softly in the breeze and thick, black curls in the wind. His back is to me.

I gasp out loud at the sight of him standing there, strong and upright and alive against the vast bright midday horizon. I never knew the sight of someone simply standing upright could look so incredibly beautiful. My breath is stolen.

But the clock is ticking. I walk towards him silently in the sand, reaching up to wipe a speck of ocean spray off my glasses. I know that he knows I’m there.

“Sherlock,” I finally say. He turns to me slowly, dragging his feet in the sand and looking down.

He looks incredibly, startlingly young. 

“Sherlock,” I say again, “would you look at me?”

He meets my gaze, and his eyes are wary. Nervous and the color of the sea. We speak over the waves. 

“I suppose Molly told you everything, then,” he says. He looks like he’s waiting for a punch or a scolding or a slap in the face or all three. He looks like he’s waiting to be alone.

“Yes,” I say quietly.

He nods. He looks over my shoulder like there’s nothing left to say. I don’t know how to tell him that I would give all the money I’ve ever had in the world to have seen him running down the halls at Cambridge, textbooks and beakers in his hands. Track marks hidden on his arms. I would have given every last cent.

Suddenly, standing with my feet in the sand and the fresh salt spray on my face, I can’t contain my joy. Bubbling up out of me in fierce, gushing rockets. I grasp his hand. “So you built this?” I say over a disbelieving laugh. “You created this place?”

He still looks nervous. “I did,” he says.

I step back from him in the sand and laugh. Turn my face up to the sky and breathe in the salt and the sunlight and the life. “You fucking _built_ this!” I cry out again.

Before he can answer me I run back towards him, grasping his shoulders with my hands. “When I touch you here, can you really feel it?” I run one hand up along his shoulder towards his neck, cupping his jaw in my hand. “Can you feel this?”

Suddenly I realize his eyes are shining wet, and he covers my hand with his own. “I can,” he whispers, and I grasp his glowing face in my hands and pull him down and kiss him with a fierce moan, pulling him close to my chest.

He kisses me deeply. Whispers my name back to me against my lips. Fresh relief flowing from his skin under my palms. I could soar.

His body is warm and alive against mine. It moves and quivers and presses along my front. Vibrates with the energy of his brilliant, sparkling mind. I can feel him, standing with his mouth against mine on the shore. I can feel what he could have become.

I can feel the sadness.

I pull back just to be able to speak. “It’s alright, Sherlock,” I whisper. His hands are shaking on my cheeks. Holding on tight. I gently run my palm down his muscular arm, resting in the crook of his elbow. “It’s alright.”

He looks down at me, still disbelieving. “John.”

His face is brilliant in the sunlight and the spray.

I take his hand in mine and try to calm my racing heart. It’s a question I never thought I would ask again in my life. “Let me marry you,” I say. I swallow hard over the next words, willing them not to get caught in my throat. “I’ll sign whatever you need. I’ll let you go.” I run my thumb along his smooth cheek. “Just let _me_ do it.”

It is achingly unbelievable that the young man before me is desperate to close his eyes and die. The sight of him lying deathly still under a crisp white sheet feels now like a haunted dream. I can’t believe that his thick curls are shorn in the World. Can’t believe that his lips aren’t really warm from his breath. That his voice doesn’t whisper my name, strong and deep.

He’s looking at me like if he blinks I’ll fly away. Brushes a strand of hair back from my face. “You’d do that?” he asks. 

The alarm on my wrist beeps. My one-minute warning.

He asks me again. “You want to do that for me?”

I don’t even have to hesitate. “Of course.” 

And he smiles at me so wide and breathless that it takes over his entire face. We both laugh. “Oh, John,” he says, right before he crashes his mouth into mine in a desperate kiss, hard enough to smash my glasses up the bridge of my nose. I tug him closer – I don’t even care.

 _Five_. . .

“I’ll tell your nurse. I’ll come back as soon as I can,” I rush out.

Then _four_. . .

“Come back quickly.” He kisses me again.

 _Three_ . . . then _two_. . .

“I don’t want to leave you,” I say.

Then _one_. . .

He smiles. His eyes are wet. “Then come back.”

I smile too, and I run my fingers through his hair.

Then I’m gone.

 

\--

 

_Three days later_

I’m wearing a brand new suit. One that fits.

My nurse leans down to brush off a stray speck of imaginary dust from my shoulder. She’s wearing normal clothes – a wonderful green fitted dress that brings out the red in her hair. She told me she bought it impulsively when she was out buying me this new suit as a surprise.

“It was on sale – I couldn’t resist,” she’d said, showing me the shining dress draped off the hanger. “Do you mind if I wear it?” she’d asked, biting her thumb.

I’d smiled at her. “Of course.” 

I notice now that the dress fabric perfectly matches my tie. Something tells me that dress hadn’t ever been on sale.

This time we roll down every window in the van, right after I make my way down the hallway past bed after bed of confused stares. Nobody congratulates me. They don’t even know.

The fresh sea breeze blows like a wave into the van, blowing my nurse’s hair free from her perfect bun. I think she’s going to roll them up and grimace and fix back the strands. Instead she looks across at me and laughs at us both. She looks like she’s on the way to her own wedding – my Nurse Harris.

Neither of us mentions what will happen after I say “I do.”

This time Nurse Hooper is waiting for us at the gleaming white doors. She’s trying to keep herself together, I can tell. 

I’ve decided I won’t let myself feel foolish about any of this. An old, wheezing, limping man wearing a new suit for the first and last time. An old, wheezing, limping man walking to his wedding in a hospital ward.

I won’t feel foolish.

This time I sit down in the offered wheelchair quickly. I need to get back to him now. Need to see him. All I’ve done for the last three days is think of his face. Think of him lying still and cold under the vast, grey ceiling. Think of him dashing down moonlit streets in his coat.

Nobody says anything as I’m wheeled down the hallways. My heart is racing, thumping like mad in my chest. I feel a hand on my shoulder as we reach Sherlock’s corridor. The warm, thin fingers of my nurse.

“Would you like these?” she asks.

I look down at what she’s holding gently in her palm. A pair of glasses.

I stare up at her in wonder. “How did you ---? How ---?”

She smirks, a bit proud of herself. I don’t blame her. “You always reach up to try to adjust them after a Visit,” she explains. “I was able to get my hands on an old photo of you. Found some I thought might be a close match.” 

My jaw is still hanging open. “You found an old photo of me?” I ask.

She nods, then leans down to slowly place the glasses on my face. The frames feel heavy and comfortable on my nose and ears. The lenses cast a sheen over my sight. She holds my hand and kneels down before me, and I marvel for the hundredth time this week how her and I have come to this. How we’ve grown so close all because I got scared and fell. I don’t even think about the contrast of her thin, smooth skin against mine.

“That photo - no wonder he likes you so much,” she says with a glint in her eyes, then she rises and helps me to my feet in one steady movement, wordlessly handing me my cane. She doesn’t need me to say anything back.

I walk inside.

I fight down a wave of nausea from my medication, making my way as quickly as I can towards his side. The curtains in his room are pulled back, filling every corner with the bright afternoon sun. Warming his pale white skin. I reach his side and immediately take his limp hand in mine, sitting on the bed and looking down into his face.

His eyes are glowing. “Hello, you,” I say.

It aches when I don’t hear his voice say “ _hello, you_ ” back.

I reach up to adjust the glasses sliding down my nose. Smooth down the front of my suit. “How do I look this time?” I ask.

He looks at me for a long time. Then he blinks once. Slowly.

I take in the thin, white hospital gown covering his frame under the sheets. “I’m a bit miffed you didn’t get dressed up for me as well,” I tease. I reach up and place my hand right over his chest, then move to run my fingers through his short, frail hair.

I know that he can’t – not really. But still I ask, “Can you feel this?”

The breathing tube hums in this throat. He blinks once.

I know that it’s time. Nurse Hooper has told me he doesn’t ever stay long in the World. It hurts him deep inside, she’d said. I turn back to the doorway and motion to them standing there. My nurse and Nurse Hooper and another man all file in, and Nurse Hooper goes straight to Sherlock’s side.

Her voice is a bit raspy. “Can I get you anything? Do you need a new pillow? Some water?”

He blinks twice to all of her questions, and I imagine I can see the fond exasperation on his face. She nods and shakes her head at herself. “I know, I know,” she says. She looks at me. “I know you’re fine.”

The man steps forward, holding a folder of papers under his arm. He’s wearing a crisp black suit, and he clears his throat. “Are you both ready?” he asks professionally. I nod, and Sherlock blinks once. I tighten my fingers around his hand, and breathe in time with the tube in his throat.

The man starts speaking. My name and Sherlock’s name and commitment and sickness and health and will you cherish and as long as you both shall live.

I honestly don’t hear him at all. I’m just looking at Sherlock, and he looks so tired.

At some point I must open my mouth and say “I do.” And at some point Sherlock must hear his turn and blink once. I can hear Nurse Hooper sniffing hard, and I can hear my own nurse’s breathing quicken behind me. The man in the suit stops talking and steps back, and I know that the deed is done.

I lean down and kiss him. Right in front of them all.

When I pull back his eyes are fixed wildly on my face, drinking me in like he’s dying of thirst. He is, in a way. He’s dying.

The room around me goes absolutely still, and I place my wrinkled hand on his cold, smooth cheek. The wrinkles around his eyes look tired and grey up close. He looks like he’s fading – sinking away into himself.

I force myself to ask, “Are you ready?”

He looks at me for almost a full minute. He blinks once.

I force myself to turn back to a tearful Nurse Hooper and reach out my hand for the papers. I don’t even read what they say. I sign them. Then I lean back so that she can stand by his side. She checks all of his monitors one last time, then runs a warm, damp cloth over his forehead. It almost hurts to watch her.

“I’ll see you soon, Sherlock Holmes,” she whispers. They share a long look, and then he blinks once. She steps back and takes a deep breath, smoothing out her nurse’s uniform and shaking her shoulders once hard. Then she reaches up towards the clear bag for his IV and adds in a new medication with steady fingers. The one that will put him to sleep.

She looks at us both. “About a minute,” she says. Then she steps back, and my own nurse steps back, and I feel like he and I are the only two people who exist on the face of the earth.

I hold his hand against my chest, letting him feel my heartbeat. I want to drape myself across him and moan when I see the fear flicker in his eyes. Instead I hold myself together. For him.

I touch his cheek. “Look at me,” I say softly. “Look at me, Sherlock. Just look at me. I’m here.” 

We gaze at each other. He suddenly looks so young. “I’ll see you on Saturday,” I tell him. “When I Visit.” The fear fades slowly from his eyes. His face looks clear. “Look at me,” I say again, as his eyelids start to droop. “I’m here,” I say, as they fall shut.

There’s movement beside me. Nurse Hooper silently switching off the whirring tube in his throat. Steady fingers shutting down machine after machine. The Device in his forehead starts to blink and glow like mad, preparing to guide him to Time for his Stay.

I hold his hand against my chest, and the room is silent and still. The whole World waits for Sherlock Holmes to be free. I kiss the back of his hand.

Then he’s gone.

-

My nurse and I haven’t said anything since we left Union Hospital. For the first time all day I feel foolish in my suit. The windows are all rolled down again in the van, and I breathe in the fresh air blasting against my face – letting it blow away the stale air of that place. 

Every second that passes feels empty without him. Like there’s nobody left in the World who knows my name. Like the emptiness stretches out vastly around me, and there’s nothing left that anyone could offer me again.

My nurse leans forward calmly when we’re almost back to the Home and types something into the command panel with her fingers. I look at her with a frown as the van suddenly swerves to the left off the main road, making its way slowly down the road to the beach. She looks out the window like this means nothing at all.

When the van stops she slides open the doors and helps me out. The sun is full and warm in the sky, and the waves sound like roars against the sand. She helps me slide out of my suit jacket and roll up the sleeves of my crisp new shirt, then we walk with my arm in hers slowly across the uneven sand.

I leave my cane behind. I’m still wearing the glasses. 

Her dress looks beautiful juxtaposed with the blue of the sea. It brings out the warmth in her skin – the color of her eyes. We stand there arm in arm for a long time in the sand. Watching the waves roll forward and back. I wonder how much trouble she’ll be in when the other staff find out she’s taken me here. I grip her arm harder.

And there, with the sea spray blowing against my face for what I know will be the last ever time in the World, and with the cancer stealing away each breath painfully from my lungs, I think of the exhaustion on Sherlock Holmes’ face. And for the first time since Catherine closed her eyes, I allow myself to bow my head and cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know - what an absolutely terrible place to end on :( I promise that more love and answers are coming soon in the last chapter! And I promise that they'll find their happy ending.
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me and trusting me up to this point! I know it's been a very sad fic so far, but the light at the end of the tunnel is near <3 THANK YOU to all who have left such beautiful support for this story! It really means the world to me. Expect chapter 4 within two weeks!


	4. I Believe in the Kingdom Come

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I’m dying.
> 
> I can see it in my nurse’s eyes when she comes in my room to check on me in the bleak, airless middle of the night. I can see it in the other residents’ faces as they hobble past my chair.
> 
> I can see it in my own face in the clouded bathroom mirror. I’m dying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy the final chapter :) Once again, I promise a happy ending. Just a kind heads up that this chapter does contain major character death, as well as brief references to the death of a child.

_Two days later_

My nurse sits with me during her lunch hour out on the wide balcony, angling her crossed legs towards me as she sips on a steaming cup of tea. I don’t eat anything.

The wind blows her hair gently back from her face, and she frowns slightly as we both look down towards the sea. “How did you first meet him in Time?” she asks. It’s the first time either one of us has mentioned what happened the other day. That I got married and went to a funeral without ever leaving the same room.

I shift in my seat under my blanket and groan. My body is failing me from the inside out, and my vision is constantly greying at the edges. She hears me struggle and instantly reaches over to adjust the pillow at my back. My bones are crumbling.

I close my eyes and smile, pain instantly forgotten. “I almost got run over by his suspect,” I say.

“His suspect?”

I think of him dashing through the moonlight like a shadow, soaring through the fog-choked dark. 

“The people who aren’t supposed to be in Time,” I say. I pause, and I know we’re both thinking of my name on the blacklisted list. She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even tense up. It makes me want to take her hand and kiss it, but I don’t. “He finds them,” I go on. “Uses this glowing white rod to send them out.”

I expect her to be shocked or disbelieving. Instead she chuckles. “So the rumor is true, then,” she says. 

I turn towards her. “The rumor?”

Her smile is contagious. “Everyone who takes care of patients who Visit knows about Sherlock Holmes,” she says. “The government tells us that there are secret officers patrolling there in Time. That that’s how those people get sent back to the World. Or get Shut Off.” She looks at me. “But we’ve all really suspected that that’s a load of shit.”

I grin back. “It is,” I agree. “It’s all him.”

She sets down her tea and sighs. The simple fact of that – of her relaxing next to me. It feels like the intimacy of old friends over decades. I shake my head at myself before I get too comfortable. Remind myself that she’s bathed my naked, wrinkled skin and held bowls for me to throw up in after she has to push burning medication through my veins. 

“You and him seem to be very much alike,” she says softly.

I almost laugh. We’ve just established that he’s an utter genius who hunts down lost criminals on the lam. Whose name is whispered in infamy in hospital corridors, and whose ideas are splashed across the government pages containing the theory of Time. And meanwhile I’m just . . . me.

I’m about to respond when she keeps speaking, voice drifting softly out over the sea, like she doesn’t even remember I’m there. “Nurse Hooper told me he’s never had a visitor either,” she says. 

I want to leap up from my chair and go and visit him now. Stand by his bedside and hold his hand and tell him all about the weather or the traffic or whatever else you talk about with people who visit you regularly.

Then I remember with an ache that I can’t. That he’s gone. The air around me suddenly trembles in thick silence, and the sky presses down on me like a vast, empty cage. 

I miss him. With a throttling pain so deep in my chest I think it’s the feeling of my own heart muscles slowly tearing in two. I miss knowing that somehow, somewhere, his carbon dioxide is joining mine in the World’s air, drifting together in swirling tendrils high up in the clouds, where they’re safe.

I feel a pat on my arm. I wonder how long she’s been standing before me, straightening the front of her nurse’s uniform and waiting for me to come out of my head. “You get to Visit during the daytime today,” she says brightly. Her cheerfulness is hollow, and her eyes are dark and concerned – just a play put on for all the people near us, withering alike in the sun. We both know I’ve Visited during the daytime before. And we both know what happened after I came back. “Will you be ready in thirty minutes?” she asks, pressing on.

My hand rubs idly over the scarring on my chest, tight and numb across my thin ribs. My eyes droop shut without me wanting to. And I nod.

-

“Three hours, Dr. Watson,” is the last thing I hear before I’m tumbling into the void and the fog. 

I pause in my Exit Point bedroom. Smooth down my hair and put on my glasses and try to calm the nervousness fluttering in my gut. I have no reason at all to feel this uncertain. No reason why I should feel like anything would be changed now – like we won’t just fall into step like we normally seem to do.

But I wonder in the deepest corners of my mind if he’ll be different now that he actually Stays. If he’ll take one look at me and say, “thank you for signing my papers, but I must run along,” and dash off, ready to take on his city with crystal eyes. Needing anything but a scarred and dying Visitor trailing behind him, still reaching with young fingertips for a cane that isn’t there.

I huff out a breath with my hand on the doorknob. I think of his cold, lifeless lips on mine, and all I want in the world is to feel them warm and moving instead.

I open the door, and I fall.

-

He’s waiting for me. _Waiting_ for me there on the porch of his home with the brightest smile I’ve ever seen illuminating his face. “John!” he calls out.

I run to him.

He meets me half way, drawing me into his arms and kissing me before I can even say a word. The nervous block of ice in my chest shatters under the force of his warmth. I laugh against his lips. Cling to the back of his shoulders.

He pulls away and kisses my forehead. “Hello, you,” he says.

I take a look up at him and gasp. He is illuminated. I never realized before how much his pain in the World still clung to him in Time. How it cloaked over him like an airless shadow, holding him back and dimming the force of his soul.

I see him now, completely free and shining, and I suddenly feel incredibly unworthy. 

“You look different,” I finally say.

He smiles even wider. “I feel different,” he says. He steps away in the warm sand and outstretches his arms, taking in the view of the rolling sea to the horizon and the skyline of his glittering city in the distance. “Isn’t it wonderful?” he calls out.

He looks like the dictionary definition of youth. Glorious mind burning and brilliant in the sun. I allow myself to smile. My voice is slightly choked. “It is,” I agree.

He grasps my hands in his. “You only have three hours, yes?” he asks. I nod, and a quick sadness flashes through his eyes before it’s gone, replaced by unimaginable excitement. “Come on, then,” he says, leading me quickly towards his house. “We don’t have much time. There’s so much to do, so much to show you.”

I follow him inside, tripping over myself, and he presses me up against the wall quickly and kisses me again, moaning and warm against my lips. He pulls back breathless, eyes shining. “Come on, come on,” he says again. He pulls on a leather jacket - one I suddenly know he must have worn during his time at Cambridge. Throws me a pair of aviators and pockets some keys. I look at him with a frown, and his smile is wicked. He gestures for me to follow him out the back door, and I stop in my tracks when I see the gleaming black motorbike. 

“Pleasant day for a drive, don’t you think?” he calls back. I stare at him speechless and laugh. Leave my glasses sitting inside and throw on the aviators instead. He ruffles through my hair with his hand when I reach him. I can barely contain myself in the presence of his light – in the energy pouring off of him and swirling around to consume me.

I feel alive.

I climb on behind him as he revs up the engine. Hold on to his hips as tightly as I can and press my chest up against his back. Completely forget that my skin there is gnarled and numb. All I feel is the delicious press of his smooth leather jacket, the smell of his curls, the hard, warm lines of his hips. I lean forward and kiss his cheek without thinking, then I lay my head down on his shoulder. Wrap my arms all the way around him and squeeze tight.

_I, John Watson, choose not to Stay in Time after I die. I choose to fade away from the earth –_

“Alright, John?”

The engine is off, and I don’t realize how tightly I’m clinging to him until his voice cuts through the panicked fog of my thoughts. I shake out my shoulders. “Yes, sorry. I’m ready.”

He doesn’t start the engine again, and we sit in the silence. The breeze off the sea tingles the gravel underneath out feet, and I can hear his jacket stretching as his breath rises and falls, pressing close and warm against my chest. “I couldn’t wait to see you,” he says quietly. “The last two days. . . shit, John. Saturday couldn’t come fast enough for me.”

I breathe in the scent at the warm crook of his neck. “Me too,” I whisper, and it’s the truest words I’ve ever uttered on this earth.

Then he revs up the engine again, loud and blasting across the beach, and I hold my breath in hot anticipation as the wind starts to whip against my face. As we soar down the winding seaside road under the sun, and as his thick, soft curls blow back against my cheeks.

-

He takes me on a breathless, soaring tour of his creation. Road by beautiful road. We speed through the air, twisting and curving along the seaside, laughing at the whipping salt breeze in our hair. He takes me through the city – past buildings I’d never seen or noticed before at night. Gorgeous churches reaching up their spires towards the heavens. Gleaming glass skyscrapers reflected in the river, and thick markets thronging with everyone who Stays, and lush, green parks stretching as far as the eye can see. 

The city is entirely different in the daytime. Gone are the fog-choked alleyways and glittering crowds. The metal doors vibrating from blood pumping music, and the lines of shimmering cars waiting for sprinting girls in high heels.

The city in the daytime is fresh air and life. It smells of the sea, and the buildings pierce the sky, and the city’s hidden crevices come alive like gorgeous painted wrinkles, offering their vine-covered secrets of the past as we zoom by with my hands tightly gripping his warm hips.

The city in the daytime looks nothing like 1986.

It just looks alive.

I cling to Sherlock’s body as we soar through his streets. His lean stomach is strong and solid under my forearms, muscles rippling with each turn. I press my dry lips to the nape of his neck. Close my eyes and just _feel_ as Time speeds past me. Feel his chest vibrating against my own through his jacket.

I realize with a warm clench through my body that he’s been laughing.

Suddenly the roaring engine slows to a hum. I lift my head from its place against his shoulder and take in where we are. A cliff at the edge of the sea.

A lighthouse.

We park along the pathway lined with crumbling stone. We both take off our sunglasses, and he gently takes my hand. He leads me. I follow him silently down towards the lighthouse, breathing in the fierce wind and letting the icy salt spray numb my face. Something tells me that this place is a holy, sacred ground. Something tells me that he came here in the World.

“This was my favorite place,” he says quietly next to me. We stand shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the cliff, keeping the warm lighthouse at our backs. “I had a motorbike when I was studying at Cambridge,” he goes on. “Used to come out to the coast on my weekends and study here.”

“In this exact lighthouse?” I ask.

He hums. The roar of the sea washes over us, and I ache in my chest that he’s taken me here. That this is my second to last ever Visit before I’m gone. And that somehow, deep down he must know.

“This is where it happened,” he suddenly whispers.

I blink, trying to keep up, and then I understand. And I want to sink heavily to my knees and hold him close. 

“How did anyone know where to find you?” I ask.

“They didn’t,” he says. “A young kid found me. Said he’d come out here to skip school and collect seashells. He ran back to Ipswich – that was the closest town. Phoned an ambulance which reached me in time.”

I turn back and look at the timeless world around me. I can see the little kid in his Wellies running up the path. I can see the old motorbike parked along in the dirt. And the stacks of books and papers strewn about inside the lighthouse on the splintered wooden floor.

And I can see the half-hidden limp body of Sherlock Holmes, lying in the dark and waiting for the end, breathing in the last ever breaths he’ll take on his own.

My eyes sting, and I look back at him, not knowing what in the world I could say. 

“Don’t give me that,” he says gently. He knows I want to ask why he re-built this place in Time. Why he chose to carry it with him, and why he spent any minutes at all recreating its paint-peeling walls. He takes my hand and starts to lead me inside. The lighthouse is impressively warm. Comforting and secret and soft. “Now you’re here with me,” he whispers in the silence.

I swallow hard and smooth back his curls. I kiss him. He grasps me with his hands. Slowly pulls off my jacket and cups my face in shaking fingers – like he can’t believe that I would want to press my lips to his in this place. I moan against him, pulse thrumming madly through my veins and desperately needing to touch his bare skin. I yank off his jacket and drop it to the floor. Start to shakily unbutton his shirt.

“Yes,” he breathes, rolling back his head. I pull him closer against me and shiver. God, how I didn’t know I needed this. But he knew.

When we’re naked he lets me press him down against the small bed in the corner. I cover him with my body – drape across his warm skin. I kiss him like my vision will disintegrate if I stop. As if he is my oxygen and my water and my heart. His huge hands run up my back and my spine, and his strong thighs wrap around my hips, tethering me to him. 

The light from clear sky beams across the darkness through the open lighthouse door, illuminating his jaw and his lips and his arms. Illuminating the long, smooth lines of his throat – no scar to ever indicate that a tube used to be there. I look down at him, and he gazes up at me, and I catch the flicker of poorly hidden hope in his eyes.

It kills me.

Suddenly I need to feel him force his way inside me. Press himself into my body so that I’ll still feel him hovering around my skin when I open my eyes in the World. Some way that I can keep him with me even after the alarm on my wrist rips my out of this place for the second to last ever time.

I pause, and I run my thumb along his full lower lip. “Be in me,” I say to him.

His breath catches in his throat, and he freezes. He takes in my face, and I suddenly feel exposed. He’s seeing every inch of my hidden thoughts. He’s a genius.

“No, John,” he says gently. His voice is strained.

I know that he knows this is all just a ruse. A way for me to be selfish and keep him with me in the World. A way for me to lessen the dreaded moment when I’ll say goodbye.

But I kiss both of his cheeks, and hold his face in my hands. Rest the whole weight of my body on top of him so he can feel. 

“Please, Sherlock,” I say. “I –” I stop myself. Swallow hard over the words that want to come spilling out. “Please,” I try again. “I just want to feel you. Now that I can, and you can,” I say.

I force every ounce of sincerity into my voice, and I can see his mind churning to make a decision. He gazes at me, and I let him see it all. My desire, and my desperation, and my body’s thrumming need to feel him everywhere. In every place. Suddenly the tension in his body disappears. He holds me close to himself, and the moment tingles.

“Ok,” he finally whispers. I nearly laugh out loud with relief.

He guides me onto my back, and finds some oil nearby. It takes us a very, very long time. He opens me slowly, eyes never leaving my face. Our shallow breaths echo and tremble in the silence, and I imagine I can see my soft moans mixing with his, dancing with the tendrils of dust in the light. It all feels strange and alien and invasive, as he presses his fingers into my body in the stillness. He leans down to run his lips again along my broken skin, open-mouthed and licking like he somehow enjoys the taste.

It feels utterly, unbelievably wonderful. 

I run my palm along the back of his neck. Hold him and shiver and cup his cheek in my hand. I want to say his name, but it comes out as just a whisper. He closes his eyes for a while when he hears it, as if the sound is running in slow drips down his back. Then he brushes his lips across mine so softly. 

“You,” he breathes. I swallow hard and grasp his hair. “You,” I say back. Then we’re ready.

He guides me onto my stomach with wide open eyes. Gently pulls up my hips. We both ignore his shaking fingers. He traces the scar on my back for a moment, and I can hear the entire ocean waiting deathly still outside. Hovering and listening for me and him to be joined.

“Oh, John,” he says, then he presses inside. 

He is in me. We move together like I didn’t know two people could ever move. I am consumed by him. Filled and covered and surrounded. Warm hands running up along my back and thighs and spine. Warm lips pressing against my shoulders. My numb skin. We breathe together over the sound of the waves pounding against the cliff’s edge outside. And as I feel sweat beading in the places where we join, and I hear him sighing as he fills me with himself, I know the exact moment when he lets himself go. 

“I can feel you,” he whispers. His voice is breathless. Awed. He rubs his cheek along my back as he reaches around and touches me. And we moan into each other until our pleasure explodes, and all I can hear when we come together is my name, precious and whispered in his voice against my skin.

Afterwards he holds me. Or actually, I hold him. 

I never want our bodies to be separated from this moment. Never want to smell anything but his skin and his hair and our intimacy still hovering in the air. I think that maybe this is what my entire life has led to. That here, on the cusp of my last weeks in the World, I am finally being allowed to find the missing piece that had always left me feeling less than whole. A cracked man.

I press him close to me and feel his heartbeat against my chest. He clings to me openly, like there’s a sadness in his arms.

Then I remember. Nothing could ever fill the hole that Catherine left. I will always, always, still have that missing piece.

He shifts, and I know he felt me tense underneath him. He leans down and kisses me again, long and slow. His lips feel heavy against mine. Hard to breathe. “We should get back,” he says, eyes flickering down to my wrist.

I look. We have thirty minutes left, so I nod. And it hurts me so sharply I think that I’ll bleed when he lifts himself from the bed and throws on his clothes. When he looks back once into the lighthouse and then walks out to wait for me, head low like he’s just said goodbye.

-

The sun is softly setting when we reach his house by the beach. The drive back along the twisting roads had been silent except for the low purr of the engine in the wind. The watch on my wrist now reads eight minutes.

We park, and he walks to the edges of the sand, drawing his jacket tighter around himself in the chill. I quickly grab my glasses from inside and throw them on, then walk out to join him with a blanket in my hands.

He’s shivering, so I drape it around his thin shoulders. We stand in the silence just watching the waves, and I suddenly feel that I’ve gone back in time. That it’s my nurse beside me, and that these waves are in the World, and that I’ve just come away from watching Sherlock Holmes die. It makes me feel utterly alone by his side.

Five minutes, my wrist beeps. Then he sighs. “John,” he says softly. The air suddenly changes, crackling with danger, and I almost look over my shoulder in fear, trying to find a gun hidden deep in the shadows.

Instead he sets his shoulders and speaks on, voice steady. “You can have your Last Will changed, you know,” he says. “You can Stay here with me. We could live here together.”

Every muscle in my body tenses, hairs sparked and prickling. I think I’ll bend over and throw up in the sand. I want to punch him and grab his shoulders in my hands. Shake him and demand that he take it all back. I want to yell out at the ocean and squeeze my own chest until I can somehow feel pain – hard enough that I would still feel it in the World.

I barely whisper. “I can’t –”

“John,” he says to me again. His eyes are earnest. He reaches out and takes my hand, holding it firmly in his. He tries to pull me closer, but my feet are firmly rooted to the ground. “Just take a second and think about what we could have here,” he says to me. “You could do the Work with me. We could live here together. You could _Stay_.” There’s a fluttering, hopeful smile on his lips.

I feel the anger roil up hotly inside me, mixed with an oily slime of self-disgust. I grit my teeth, shivering as a clench rolls through my chest. I fight the urge to fling myself forward into his arms. Have him hold me as I moan at the thought of pink fairy wings disappearing forever from my sight. Instead I gently pull my hand back from his grip and flex my fingers, turning away from his gaze towards the sea. My words hurt my throat as they crawl past my numb lips. “I just can’t, Sherlock. You don’t understand –”

“Don’t understand what?” he interrupts, voice desperate. He turns towards me, and his eyes are blazing. He drops the blanket from his shoulders into the sand, and the hurt rolls off his body so thickly I think I’ll drown. Gone is the hopeful little smile on his lips.

“You came back for me,” he grits out, voice thin. “You _looked_ for me. You visited me and you married me and you signed my papers. You _asked_ to see me.” His eyes are burning wet, and I can’t force myself to look away. His voice breaks. “You held my hand!” he finishes. Then he waits.

The words come flying out of me before I can think. “So what, today was just some massive plan?” I shoot back. “Your way of convincing me to Stay with you? Have a fun ride, take me to that lighthouse, everything all worked out perfectly in advance?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he cries back. “Why wouldn’t I try to convince you?”

My vision fogs. “Because you don’t understand!” I yell.

He stills. Dangerously, murderously still. His breath is fire, and his eyes are ice. I watch helplessly as the muscles in his jaw tighten and tense. He wants desperately to yell at me, but he’s holding himself back. A black part of me wishes he would scream in my face. 

He licks his lips, tension seeping out of his shoulders. “I know that you lost your daughter, John,” he says to me gently. “I know that you wish she was here.”

The oxygen is sucked from my lungs in a rush. I think that maybe I’ll shrivel up and explode. “What the fuck do you know about her?” I force myself to ask. I can feel the rage burning in my eyes. The fear.

“I know that she died,” he says steadily. Calmly. His eyes soften. “I know that you were there.”

“How dare you?” I cry back.

He takes a step towards me, trying to place a hand on my shoulder. I flinch. “I know she was a little girl,” he says, hand still hovering in the air above my skin.

I nearly moan. “You don’t understand,” I try to say. The words are lost in a choked noise in my chest, drowned out by the sound of the waves.

He lays his hand on my shoulder, gripping me firmly. “I know that you think it was your fault.”

His words slice through me like a hot knife. Pierce my lungs. I want to pick up handfuls of sharp sand and hurl them - straight into his face like a child.

Instead I clench my fists. Grit my teeth even harder. I suddenly feel utterly, undeniably dangerous, and I stare out at the waves until my wrist beeps two minutes, shrugging his hand hard off my shoulder. His touch is painful.

“How do you know that?” I finally ask. “How can you possibly know that?”

He doesn’t answer me. His body is radiating patience. It makes me want to punch something and scream until he’s angry. “Probably she asked you to go out and play with her,” he goes on.

My gut clenches. “You don’t know what –”

“You were working, so you told her you’d join her in a bit.”

“No –”

“And she crossed the street without you to get to the park.”

“Sherlock, I swear to god –”

“And your wife blamed you when she got hit by the car.”

Everything stops. I grab his shoulders, wanting to crumple up and scream. I glare into his soft eyes and let him see the ugliness staining my skin. 

I see Catherine, lying in a heap in the road. I see _her_ \- Mary – glaring at me dying from her own hospital bed. “ _You killed her_ ,” she’d said to me with her last living breaths. “ _You killed her with your own two hands_.”

I realize too late that I’m nearly crying before him. Sherlock’s hand is on my cheek, and I blink out of my thoughts. He looks at me gently, thrumming with concern. “Oh, John,” he says softly. I wince and close my eyes. 

I suddenly see him lying still and cold beneath the ceiling, eyes wide with fear before locking onto mine. I see him illuminated and full of life, running to me with open arms just three short hours ago.

I try to take a step back to breathe, and instead I sink to my knees on shaking legs. “You don’t understand,” I say again weakly. The earth feels hard and harsh under my legs. Begging me to pound my fists down into it to feel pain.

I feel his hand on my shoulder. The entire world is upside down. “Stop punishing yourself, John,” he says gently. “She would want you to be happy. Stop denying yourself what we could have –”

“How do you know what she would want?” I yell up at him. I rise to my feet in a rush, new anger flashing in my gut. It feels wonderful to be riled up and angry with energy. Nothing like a dying man on his knees in the sand. Nothing like an ex-soldier crying and weak.

He looks shocked. “Because she loved you,” he says, eyes wide. “And you could be happy here. Happy with me –"

“And what about you, huh?” I spit back. I can’t listen to him – can’t hear another gentle, loving word cross his lips. I feel wild. “What horrible things can I reveal about you? Isn’t that fair? Can I make the tables even?” I say.

He shrinks back from me, but holds his head high. “You already know I’m a ‘drug addict queer who tried to off himself’,” he says icily. “What more could you possibly reveal –”

“This!” I cry. I hold out my hands to the endless sea – the glittering city at our backs. My chest heaves. I want to hurt him for creating something so beautiful. Something beautiful that she can never have. And I hate myself more fiercely than I ever thought possible.

Out of the buzzing silence I hear Catherine screaming my name, echoing like a wail in my head. My eyes sting hotly, and I force myself to press on. “Your nurse told me you finished the prototype for this place decades before anyone else could Visit,” I spit out. “What – did you just want to keep your little sandbox to yourself? Only gave it up once the government offered you some cash?”

He blinks hard. “We had to make sure it was _safe_!” he cries back. I watch with ugly satisfaction as the walls come down in his eyes.

“And you’re telling me they let you come here for years alone to test that? Your personal safety be damned?”

He looks like he’s been slapped. My palm burns like I’ve just done it. 

“Nobody _made_ me test it out for all those decades,” he says. “I chose to. It’s not like I had much to lose if it went wrong,” he grits out.

There’s water suddenly brimming in my eyes. I blink it down. “You kept it all to yourself,” I go on. “She could have been here. She could have had this. But you –”

“I’m not God!” he cries back. “I can’t save bloody everyone!”

“No – you just want to run around here playing superhero,” I say. “Deciding on your own fucked up rules who can Stay and who needs to leave.”

He’s furious. It terrifies me. “You’re saying I should have Dispatched you the first second I saw you were a soldier?” he asks. “That I should have ripped all of this away from you because of a stupid rule?”

I feel gutted. “That’s not what I’m saying, and you know —”

“And speaking of playing at being the hero, look at yourself,” Sherlock says. He looks at me with sharp pain in his eyes. I can’t even imagine now what his eyes looked like an hour ago, soft and trembling in the quiet lighthouse air as he breathed warm kisses across my bare skin. “Did you see me as some charity case for your last weeks on earth? Some good deed so you can leave feeling good about yourself?”

“That’s not –”

“You saw the poor old man lying trapped in his bed and married him just out of pity? So he could die?”

I shake my head fiercely. “I did it because I care about you!” I cry out. 

He looks frantic. “Then Stay!”

“You’re telling me not to care about my own daughter,” I shoot back.

His nostrils flare. I think he’s going to growl at me. And I know that I want him to keep yelling in my face. For him to hate me forever. For him to be the one to tell me to leave. Instead he reaches forward and holds my arm. Gently.

“I’m telling you not to use her as some sick eternal punishment,” he says low.

I wrench my arm away. “I deserve it,” I hear myself say.

“No, you don’t.” His voice is fierce. “She would want you to be here.”

“She didn’t have a choice,” I moan.

“But _you_ do. Stay with me.”

“You already have what you want,” I say. “But she’s . . . she’s –”

“John –"

“I can’t leave her!"

“Don’t leave either of us.” He reaches for me again. “Stay with me,” he says.

I groan. “I can’t Stay here without Catherine. . .”

“But John look at me! We could have this –”

“I can’t Stay here without her.”

“Why are you so afraid of this?” he finally cries.

My alarm cuts through our voices like a siren. Thirty seconds.

We stand in sudden silence, the wind whipping between our bodies like a scream. I’ve never felt so flayed raw in my life. So naked and crumbling.

Sherlock looks at me for a moment, his bottom lip trembling. It looks like he’s saying goodbye. Steel walls closing in around his beautiful blue eyes. I feel like I can’t catch my breath – chest panting.

He licks his lips. “I’m sorry about your daughter,” he says quietly, like stone. He takes a step backwards. “And I hope you enjoy your last Visit next week.”

Then with one final look he turns to walk back towards the house, veering left to the motorbike with his keys in his hand. I want to run after him, but my feet are rooted harshly to the ground. He turns back when his hand is on the gleaming handlebar, and the wind whips majestically in his hair. I want to weep. For some reason I bend down and frantically pick up the blanket, hoping it will still feel warm from his shoulders as I grip it tightly in my hands.

It's cold.

“And the government didn’t offer me any money, in case you were wondering,” he calls back to me in the sand. 

_Five_ . . .

He hauls one leg over the motorbike, revving the engine with his heels. He stares straight through my soul, leaving me breathless. 

_Three_. . .

His voice breaks. “I just wanted to walk,” he says. 

_Two_ . . .

Then he disappears in a cloud of sand and fog, speeding down the road into the slowly setting sun.

I cover my face with my hands. Feel wet cheeks. I open my mouth to call out his name with a moan. I start to make the sounds.

 _One_. . .

Then I’m gone.

 

\--

 

_Four days later_

I’m dying.

I can see it in my nurse’s eyes when she comes in my room to check on me in the bleak, airless middle of the night. I can see it in the other residents’ faces as they hobble past my chair.

I can see it in my own face in the clouded bathroom mirror. I’m dying.

My nurse takes my hand gently in hers. Pats it once with her palm where we sit out on the balcony, far away in the corner from everyone else. I imagine I can feel the sea breeze on my face. Imagine that I’m not groaning in pain.

“Do you think you can try at some supper, Dr. Watson?” she asks. The concern in her voice is so thick it nearly chokes me. “You didn’t eat anything yesterday,” she goes on, acting casual. “It might be nice.”

I idly rub my other hand over my skeletal chest, feeling the bones ripple underneath my burned skin. It hurts to even turn my neck to look at her. I’m a ruin. I give her a look in my eyes – one that says I know exactly what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to be Super Nurse to bring me back from the brink. And we both know that it’s far too late for anything like that.

Since coming out of my last Visit my body has failed me more and more each hour. I tell myself in the daytime that it’s just natural biology. That the cancer has finally caught up with my old bones, and is dragging me slowly towards that black and gentle end.

And I tell myself in the loneliest hours of the night that it isn’t because I’ve lost Sherlock Holmes forever, in every place. That it isn’t because I looked him in the eyes and chose to hurt him – punishing him with Catherine’s last cries in my head.

That it isn’t because I left him all alone.

My nurse grins sadly at me. “Sorry, I know,” she says. “But it’s still my job to ask.”

I smile at what seems to be our private joke – joking about how badly my body seems to want to die. She somehow smiles back, and her warmth eases my chest. The hot, searing pain that I’ve held in myself since I watched Sherlock disappear in a dust cloud along the road.

My nurse grows still beside me, and there’s tension in her shoulders. “Would you still like to have your last Visit on Saturday?” she asks. The unspoken “ _if you live that long_ ” hovers thickly between us.

The thought of Visiting without Sherlock Holmes waiting for me feels so suffocating I nearly choke in the fresh air. In my mind I see myself wandering aimlessly through dark streets, hands in my pockets and a limp in my step. The familiar cloud of regret settles thickly over my throat, cutting off my air slowly like it’s done every moment since Sherlock looked at me and said _I just wanted to walk._

Her hand is on mine. She looks frightened. It’s a small comfort among the blackness that this time she is frightened _for_ me, and not _of_ me. I try to smile, but it comes out a grimace. “I’m not sure a last Visit would be a good idea,” I say.

She frowns. “But Mr. Holmes --?” She trails off, not knowing exactly what to say.

I don’t blame her. I don’t know what the hell to say either. I try to speak through the sharp pain in my chest. The one that makes me want to wring my own neck. Lay down in front of a speeding car and take Catherine’s place. Press poison into my arm in a darkened lighthouse so Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t ever have to.

I feel anything but brave, but I decide on the truth. “Sherlock knows I signed the paper not to Stay,” I say quietly. “He wanted –” I swallow hard. “He wanted me to Stay with him.”

I think for a horrible second that my nurse is going to cry. That or scold me. She doesn’t, just grips my hand harder in hers. “You can have that changed, you know,” she says gently. “And even if you choose to Stay, it doesn’t have to be permanent. You can always enter your code to be Shut Off.”

I shake my head, tired smile thin on my lips. “That’s the same thing he said to me,” I tell her.

The moment turns lonely and cold after I speak, opening up beneath me like a bottomless, dark sea. My Nurse Harris feels it too, and I want to sigh with relief when she clears her throat, chasing away the doom in the air. “We’ll just have to see how you’re feeling on Saturday,” she says. “You can decide on your last Visit then.”

Her voice breaks the tiniest bit on the word “last.” It reminds me how implacable she’s been. Like an anchor.

She looks down at her watch and gives a little cry before jumping to her feet. I’ve never seen her look so unruffled before. “Are you late for something?” I ask. It pains me that I can’t jump up to my feet beside her. That I can’t dash with her back into the fluorescent lights of the Home, helping her get ready for wherever she needs to be and basking in the excitement pouring through her skin.

She blushes a bit, and looks down at her feet. “I’ve – actually I’ve got a date tonight,” she says, lips quivering on a restrained smile. She looks up at me, eyes bright. “With Peter.”

I frown. She said the name Peter with such confidence, as if I should know. “Peter --?” I ask.

Her eyes blow wide, and she rolls her eyes at herself. “Sorry, forgot you can’t read my mind,” she laughs. “Peter – that doctor,” she explains. “The one I met at Union.”

I wait for myself to wince at the mention of that place. Instead I’m filled with joy so immediately I nearly laugh. It feels unprecedented to share joy like this, like my body can’t even contain it anymore, leaking out like sunlight through my weary, thin skin. And I marvel that the universe somehow thinks I’m still worthy of feeling happiness like this. After everything.

I reach up for her hand, and she takes it eagerly. My fingers shake against her smooth, white skin, making our joined hands tremble between us. I find I don’t have anything to say, but she doesn’t mind.

“He’s picking me up in half an hour,” she says after a minute. “Can you come and wish me luck before I go?” 

We both know she really means _can I find you wherever they’ve wheeled you?_ since I haven’t been able to stand in two days. But the horror of that, the pain of that, is forgotten in a blink. Somehow the thought of seeing her before her date fills me with emotion, like a memory I’ve always wanted to accomplish will be fulfilled.

I blink hard, waiting for the cough in my chest to be gone. “I’d like that,” I say, and then she’s fluttering back inside, already letting her hair down out of her bun.

-

Thirty minutes later I’m sitting near the Home’s entrance in my wheelchair. The sun is slowly setting over the hills outside, filling the stark white hallway with warmth. It feels like a great big blanket on my skin, covering the bruises and IV scars and veins. Somebody must have wheeled me here – I’m not really sure who. The pain medication makes me feel like I’m in a fog, woozy and running in slow motion through a thick grey cloud.

I marvel at my nurse’s thoughtfulness – to have someone wheel me out here to wish her luck. Just then she appears from the mist in my head, looking like sunlight filling up every crevice of the earth. It’s hard for me to focus my eyes on what she’s even wearing. All I can see are her eyes and her hair.

She kneels before me in her heels. She looks concerned. “Dr. Watson –” she starts. I grab her hand as hard as I can to cut her off. I’ll wither away if I have to hear her worries right now. If I have to see her brilliant illumination dim and die as she wonders whether or not I’ll make it through the night.

The same way I made Sherlock’s radiance turn black the moment I looked into his hopeful eyes and told him “no.”

I suddenly wish with desperation that the pain medication could numb my self-loathing the same way it’s numbed my aching limbs.

I blink back to the present. She’s waiting for me. “You look so lovely,” I say. My voice is hoarse and shaking. 

She grins. “I bet you say that to all the pretty girls,” she says. She winks at me and lowers her voice. “And boys.”

I laugh, but it comes out like a snarling in my chest. 

She looks at me then. Really looks at me. I can see the thoughts in her head plain as day, crystal clear. As if she’s writing them out in the sky for me to see. She’s thinking that I never got to be picked up by Sherlock Holmes to go out to dinner. I feel that I could reach out and physically touch her guilt.

I shake my head softly and give her a smile. Flood with relief when I see she understands what I’m saying. That she shouldn’t feel any guilt at all. Not her.

Suddenly a car pulls up smoothly behind her, a gleaming white box waiting patiently in the road. I can just barely make out a man’s head peering out the window. He’s waving. “Ready then, Rose?” he calls.

My heart flutters. I never realized until this moment how important it was for me to discover her name. I squeeze her arm before she can move to stand.

“Rose,” I say. It sounds lovely on my tongue. “Is that your first name?”

She looks quickly back and forth making sure other nurses aren’t near. We aren’t supposed to know their names – I know because they told me that on my first day here, a little insignificant line in the midst of hours of new information, as if that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary at all.

Then again, we also aren’t supposed to be allowed to travel to the beach, or have five-minute Visits in the daytime away from the Home, or marry other people just so that they can die.

She leans in close to me. I can smell her soft perfume. A crazed, confused part of me wants to beg her to take me with them – take me to the cinema and the restaurant and the bar. Let me walk behind them and pay for their dinner.

“Everyone calls me Rose. It’s my middle name,” she whispers. “But actually, I’ve always preferred my first. It’s Catherine.”

Then she kisses me softly on the cheek and fades away, drifting out into the world like a lovely ghost and leaving me gasping for breath in my chair, hands gripping tightly at the faded armrests.

My heart hammers. I barely remember to wave as they’re driving away. My chair starts to roll back – someone’s moving me inside. The sound of her words – her smooth voice saying that name – hovers around me like warmth in the air. It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say that name in decades. I wait for myself to feel gripped with pain, but instead I only feel calm, like I’m floating.

Just before my chair turns back inside I crane my neck to catch a glimpse of the sun dropping over the hills. I drink it all in. Try to memorize every detail. A part of me clenches like it’s saying goodbye. I think as I’m finally wheeled inside that I’m just saying goodbye to Catherine, to my nurse as she’s whisked off to her date, beautiful and laughing.

Then I realize as the fluorescent lights hum and blind my eyes that I wasn’t actually saying goodbye to her at all. 

I realize I was saying goodbye to the outside.

 

\--

 

_Eleven hours later_

“Dr. Watson? Dr. Watson can you still hear me? Are you with us?”

A voice calls out to me from miles away, down at the other end of a long, dark tunnel.

I force my eyes open like I’m coming up for air.

“There you are,” the voice says. “I’m right here. Can you see me?”

I strain my eyes and peer through the thick, wet fog. Soft sunlight pierces gently through my vision. Little beams. I realize I’m lying down flat in my bed, and my nurse is standing over me. No long, dark tunnel.

My nurse looks frazzled and worried. Her hand is clasping mine. There are tubes everywhere – more tubes than I’ve ever seen in my life. And more beeping. I realize that her hair is still down around her shoulders, and her white nurse’s uniform is black and made of lace.

Something clicks into place in the back of my mind.

“Your date,” I try to say. 

Suddenly the worried chaos clears from her face. She smiles at me. “It went very well,” she says gently. She adjusts one of the tubes near my wrist. “I’ve just come back to see you.”

Something in her eyes tells me I’ve asked her this question a few times before. And something tells me she didn’t come back just for fun.

Another fact clicks into place in the back of my mind – like the missing item forgotten off a grocery shopping list.

Yes, I remember it now. I’m dying.

It’s painful. I gasp as a nauseating wave of fear flows through me, settling in the center of my bones like fire. For a moment I wonder what is making that sound – that odd little whimper that whines in the air. Then I realize with a jolt that it’s me.

“We’re giving you something for the pain,” I hear her say. “It’s kicking in. Dr. Watson, do you think you can look up at me?”

I come up for air again. Focus on her face. I feel like I’m soaring through the clouds. Like a plane.

“There you are,” she says again. “Keep looking at me.”

I do, and the pain slowly fades from my limbs, like fires being put out by streams of cool water. It feels wonderful. Marvelous. I want to leap up and dance.

I’m sinking.

“Dr. Watson,” she says steadily. “Are you sure of your decision? Can you remember what you told me when I first arrived? What we discussed about your Last Will?”

I frown and try to understand – her words slowly fitting into an order that isn’t mud. Then, like a spark, it all hits me in a flash. Everything I told her. Everything I decided.

“Yes,” I suddenly say. I’m surprised at my own voice. “Yes,” I say again. I try to nod. “I’m sure.”

She looks at me for a very long time, holding my hand as other nurses flutter at the sidelines, slowly fading away into the all-consuming grey.

I’m sinking. And I realize that I am not afraid.

Suddenly I know I have to tell her before I go. My throat feels raw and painful when I speak. Words like sandpaper crawling across my tongue.

“I had a daughter named Catherine,” I whisper.

My nurse nods, and I see that her eyes are wet. She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear. “I know,” she says.

I’m sinking.

“She had your eyes,” I say to my nurse.

I look at them. Look at them and nothing else exists. The mattress beneath me is a pool of soft water, warm and clean on my skin. I want to sink.

“Are you in pain?” I hear her ask. I don’t remember closing my eyes.

I’m so far away from her. “No,” I say.

“John?” I hear. Her palm is so soft. “John,” she says again. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

A part of me deep inside laughs at her joke. “Catherine,” I say. Then I sink to the bottom.

I think before I go that I’ll see one last thing. Her eyes – warm and soft in the midst of gentle black.

But I don’t see Catherine’s eyes as I walk towards the dark. I see eyes like the stars. Black curls.

Then I’m gone.

 

\--

 

More than anything, Catherine loved seashells.

I took her on a special trip to the sea three times. Just her and me surrounded by the seagulls and the waves.

She would run along for hours, digging fiercely to find them. She would hold them in her little hands, wet and dripping with mud. And the foam would rush over her bare ankles in the sand, licking at her legs as she laughed.

“Daddy!” she would cry. “Come look at my treasure!”

I would look. I would pull back her hair from her face.

She would bite at her tongue. “Let’s choose one to bring home for mum,” she would say.

We would choose, and we’d walk hand in hand on the shore, making our way slowly back towards the car.

And all three times we went, she would ask for me to carry her.

And all three times after we made it back, I’d put her in bed. And I’d find in my trouser pocket a precious little seashell, hidden and waiting for me to find as a surprise.

 

\--

 

_Five seconds later_

I stand still. Scrunch up my nose and try to sneeze. I do.

I look down in the sunlight at the fresh, young skin of my hands. Take two steps forward on my legs.

No limp.

A smile illuminates my face when I realize this is _real_. That I, John Watson, am really, truly here.

With a laugh in my lungs I run towards where I need to go. Run like mad. Smile wide at the fresh air against my face and in my hair, and the way the ground feels so strong and steady beneath my feet. I run until I’m panting and breathless and sore. I run so that I can’t change my mind and go back. So that I won’t stop and regret it all and punch in the special code on my wrist that says: Shut me Off.

I run until I reach the peeling front door of Sherlock’s home. Then I stop, with my hands on my waist as I try to catch my breath, and I knock before I can convince myself to leave.

I wait in the silence, heart thudding in my chest. I feel I might faint or keel over with the dread. Dread that he’ll see me, take one look, and scoff. Turn his back, rightfully so, and walk off, leaving me behind to know I’d hurt him beyond repair. Leaving me behind with no reason to Stay.

My nurse’s words echo in my head as I wait, peering through the front windows to see if he’s inside as the silent house creaks and moans in the breeze.

“ _Are you sure you’d like to change your Last Will?_ ” she’d said as I lay gasping with pain, being flooded with medication that would make me go to sleep.

I’d thought of Sherlock cupping my face in his hands. “ _Yes,_ ” I’d said. “ _I’m sure. I want to Stay_.”

“ _You can leave at any time. Just enter your code to be Shut Off,_ ” she’d explained again, adjusting the Device on my forehead. “ _But once you do that, you can’t go back_.”

“ _I know,_ ” I’d said, dying. “ _I just have to try_.”

She’d smiled, standing there in her black lace dress, barefoot with her high heels left by the door. “ _He’ll be waiting for you_ ,” she’d whispered with shiny wet eyes. “ _You’ll see. He’ll be there waiting for you._ ”

But he isn’t here waiting for me. He’s gone. I frantically search around the outside of the house, then peer as far as I can down the beach, along the peer.

Sherlock Holmes is nowhere in sight. I start to run. A low panic bubbles deep in my gut, warning like a siren booming far off in the distance. I sprint back towards the road, pushing my glasses up my face. Search around me desperately for something to ride. People stare at me as I fight my private war with myself, dashing down the pavement and eyes peeled for a bike.

My mind tells me he wasn’t there because he doesn’t want to see me. Doesn’t want to see a scarred coward who said “no.”

My soul tells me that I need to find him more than anything else on earth. More than breathing or living or walking without a limp.

I finally find a bike, leap on, and fly. I haven’t ridden a bicycle in decades, and I wobble. The pedals feel alien and childish under my feet as I speed through the streets, looking down each alleyway desperate for a moving shadow. I make my way back towards the place we first met. Almost gasp at the way the square looks so different in the sunlight – comforting and warm and covered in safety. Nothing like the danger-filled pool of black fog. Completely unaware that John Watson had once tackled a man to the ground on her dark, wet asphalt. Completely unaware that this is where I learned I could run.

I don’t see him. Keep searching. Wind through the streets until I pass by the drug house. It’s ridiculous. There’s no reason on earth why he should be here, moping around a place where he once had a case. But it’s all I have to go on, and my heart clenches in fear. This growing, secret dread that prickles in my mind, whispering to me that I’ll never see those crystal eyes again. Not even looking down at me in anger or disgust.

Keep searching. I ride through what feels like the entire city, until my thighs are weak and aching, and my heart feels like lead. And then, as I come around a curve with slumped shoulders, I catch a faint whiff of the salt sea on the breeze. I suddenly know where he is.

I’m terrified. I push myself, pedal faster than I ever thought I could. Flying around corners and dashing through streets. I grip the handlebars so tightly my knuckles turn white, useless and numb as I make my way towards him – towards the lighthouse that sits like a black speck on the horizon.

I call out his name when I finally make it to the short gravel path. Throw down the bike and leap off in a rush, stumbling over my aching legs as I run towards the cliff.

“Sherlock!” I cry out again. I feel frantic. My mind flashes visions like death before my eyes – Sherlock Holmes slumped and wilting on the floor in the darkness. Sherlock Holmes pale with a needle in his arm. 

Sherlock Holmes with a wrist alarm beeping: Shut Off.

I almost call out his name again as I sprint to the doorway, then I gasp and stop in my tracks when I suddenly see him. He’s elegant and beautiful, standing just outside the open door with the warm breeze blowing through his hair. He isn’t lying limp on the floor in the darkness. He’s wearing a fresh, clean suit, and his eyes are blown wide.

“John?” he breathes. He stands still like a statue.

I realize with a jolt that I never planned what to say. The waves echo between us like a roar, filling the vast empty space between our bodies. I drink in the sight of him, let my eyes cling to his face. I know, more than anything, that this is why I was meant to Stay. To catch just one last glimpse of this man before I can close my eyes in peace. Dead to the World and Time forever. Really gone.

I feel calm. “Sherlock,” I say. It feels wonderful on my lips.

He sucks in a breath. “Today isn’t Saturday,” he says quickly. His eyes are still wide like they’re stunned. He’s so beautiful.

I take a step closer. “I know,” I respond.

He swallows hard. “But you –” 

“Sherlock, I’m so sorry.” I immediately feel less heavy. Less dead. I look at him and let him read the thoughts on my face. I watch the wind blow a curl gently across his forehead. “I just came to tell you that I’m sorry,” I say. I swallow past the lump in my throat. “For everything.”

He blinks hard twice, then suddenly unfreezes. His hands fly up to grip at his hair, running back his curls before hanging limply at his sides. “You’re dead,” he finally says. It isn’t a question.

I realize I’m not sad, and I nod. “I am.”

He looks wild. “But you’re here,” he says slowly. He’s so tense.

I shake my head, taking in a deep breath of the air, filling my lungs with the sea. I hold up my hand slowly, like he’ll bolt if I move too fast. “I couldn’t –” I step closer. “I couldn’t fade away without trying to find you,” I say. “I needed to tell you I’m sorry.”

We’re much closer now, standing still face to face. I can feel the barest hints of his warmth along my front, and I find myself breathing in time to his lungs as they rise and fall quickly beneath his shirt. I feel as if I’ve somehow just accomplished my life’s mission. Like I’ve atoned for the sins of my days, and I’m free. I ignore the deep part of myself that cries out in pain at the thought of not Staying here by his side.

But he would never want me to Stay. And that’s why I’m sorry.

He still hasn’t moved, and I think that maybe it’s time for me to slowly slip away. I look at him one last time, take a deep breath –

“Don’t go!” He’s gripping me hard by the wrist. I don’t even know how he moved so quickly. I’m drowning in the feeling of him being so close. He moves a hand to my shoulder and holds on. “Don’t go.”

I blink hard, stunned. I never thought I’d hear those words come from his mouth again. “But I figured you wouldn’t want me to Stay. I just Stayed for a bit to apologize –”

“I know,” he says quickly. His hands are so warm. He suddenly smiles. “That’s because you’re an idiot.”

I startled laugh escapes from my chest. I reach up and cling to his wrists with shaking fingers. I want to ask him how the hell he could ever forgive me – how he would ever want to see my face again in this place.

But before I can do that he’s kissing me fiercely. His lips are on mine, warm and soft and consuming. He holds me. Wraps his strong arms around my back, presses his fingers through my hair. I cling to him. Fisting rough and desperate into the front of his shirt and holding him so close I fear we’ll topple over into the grass. I couldn’t let go even if I tried. I’m lost. He sighs against my lips. “Oh, John,” he whispers, and I shiver up my spine with such warmth I nearly moan.

He pulls back and presses his forehead to mine. I’m gasping, wet lips turning cold in the wind. “You changed your Last Will,” he whispers into my skin.

I reach up and hold his warm cheek, amazed that I can. “I did.”

“You came back for me,” he says, shaking.

“I did.” I rub my nose gently across his cheek and inhale. I just want to drown in his air. “Please,” I somehow manage to whisper. “Please, Sherlock, forgive me,” I say.

I think he’ll pull back and say something serious – look into my eyes or hold me at arm’s length.

Instead I feel him suddenly laugh against my mouth, and he’s kissing me again, tasting me deep and slow. I kiss back, terrified that he’ll disappear if I stop. 

When he pulls back again he cups my face in his hands, and presses one last soft kiss to the corner of my mouth. “You,” he whispers.

I’m overcome. “You,” I say back. His thumbs are on my cheeks. I don’t even remember starting to cry, but I am, and he catches the water on my face with his hands.

“You’ll Stay here,” he says. I blink hard and nod. 

“You’ll live with me,” he goes on. “You’ll come live in my house. You’ll be my partner with the Work.”

I nod, and nod, and nod.

“You are magnificent!” he suddenly cries. I laugh, startled, as he vibrates before me, looking young and illuminated and alive. Looking radiant. He grasps my hand in his, then drops it and runs back inside. I hear objects falling and crashing to the ground, then he reappears, stumbling and throwing a jacket over his shoulders. He takes my hand again and starts pulling me away. I follow him breathlessly as we jog towards his motorbike. Leap on behind him with my hands on his warm hips.

He fumbles with the keys. “We have so much to do,” he says. “Two new cases for tonight, and I have to get you up to speed with my plans.”

My throat is choked, warm and full of emotion. I can’t say anything, just nod into his neck, rubbing my cheek along the leather of his jacket and feeling his body breathe and move under my hands.

It is unbelievable. Completely unreal that I’m sitting behind Sherlock Holmes, about to go back to his home – our home. About to spend the whole night dashing after him in the shadows. Hearing him whisper in my ear. Saying my name.

The engine roars, and I tighten my grip around his hips. Suddenly he’s lifting my hand off his stomach. I watch over his shoulder as he brings it to his lips.

“Thank you,” he whispers. He kisses my palm.

I almost laugh into the nape of his neck. It is unbelievable. Impossible and unfathomable that Sherlock Holmes is thanking me when he is the one who saved me from fading away. When he is the one who looked at me and told me I could run.

I go to tell him all of his, but then we’re soaring down the road, laughing and wind whipping and flying across the hills. Breathing in the salt sea as his curls brush my cheeks.

I hold on to his warm hips, and I think of my daughter.

I close my eyes, but I am not gone.

I’m alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And they rode off into the sunset. . .
> 
> Thank you so much for reading and joining me on this little AU adventure! I had such a blast writing it and diving into this rich universe. A gigantic thank you to everyone who has left comments, kudos, support, recs, etc, and also THANK YOU to all of you for trusting me with this angsty story! Especially those of you who didn't know the original source material. I truly hope this story was still enjoyable and understandable if you haven't watched the episode it's based on. :)
> 
> I'm around on [Tumblr](http://sincewhendoyoucallme-john.tumblr.com//) and [Twitter](http://twitter.com/sincewhen_john/) if you wanna say hi.
> 
> I've got a little "Gimme Shelter" ficlet in the works, and will hopefully move on to a new project (probably another AU) soon! Thanks for allowing me to play around with our beloved Holmes and Watson. I promise all comments will eventually be replied to!


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